The Glittering Present
by northtreker
Summary: Jaylah has already had to adapt to one alien world and now the Federation demands that she adapt to another. James T. Kirk has offered her a pathway but can she walk it successfully? Will her journey ever return her home? Jaylah's story. Post Star Trek: Beyond
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note: I own nothing. All characters, objects and the entire world I am playing with is owned by Paramount productions. However, Jaylah's background is left almost entirely blank. I have tried to keep to her personality as closely as possible and have tried to ground what descriptions I add within the bounds of plausibility although I am definitely open to input as these details are laid out. (I also have a few paragraphs of my own on the star (a real one) that I am basing Jaylah's home off of and the planetary system (that I have entirely made up) that orbits it if anyone is interested. That being said any errors in this work are entirely my own and do not reflect upon Paramount, Justin Lin or Sofia Boutella._

 _This is a Jaylah centric fic and deals extensively with Star Trek Beyond. Moreover, some key lines have been taken directly from the screen play. As such, there will naturally be spoilers for the new movie, Star Trek Beyond, as well as the first two: Star Trek 2009 and Star Trek: Into Darkness._

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She couldn't help grinning; her house - her house was really going to fly. She glanced over to her Engineer, the Montgomery Scotty; he had done it. He had fixed it so that her house would fly. The smile stretched wider, her long eyeteeth digging slightly into the corners of her mouth while her khutut alwajh flickered wildly in excitement. Some Babëreshë could, to an extent, control the bioluminescent cells that formed the stripes on their faces but for Jaylah, for as long as she could remember, as went her emotions so followed her coloring.

Hikaru Sulu's voice echoed slightly from the mostly synchronized mouths stationed through out the engineering room. "Hold on to something," he suggested. Jaylah wasn't quite sure, she was still having a hard time reading the blank faced aliens, but she thought he sounded excited, or maybe nervous. Montgomery Scotty's eyes dilated and turning on the ball of his foot he dashed off, grabbing the small rocky alien, Keynsler? and proceeded to wedge the two of them under a near by console. So...nervous then.

Turning the other way she ran toward a recessed section of wall that once housed some burned out electronics that she had cannibalized for parts. She braced the hide underside of her boots against the grating in the floor and just had time to reach out snag two cable ends that still jutted out from the wall before the ground in front of her tilted down sharply. For a moment she was staring out over a yawning chasm, the expanse of the reactor room falling away before her; instinctive terror of height flooded through her body, helping her clamp down on her hand holds, feeling the rubbery sheathing mold between her fingers.

Then her house began to fall with her and she was weightless. Pulling herself back deeper into the alcove she laughed delightedly as her hair floated out in front of her face. It reminder her of... images: her father laughing, her mother fussing nervously with Jaylah's hair, the reporter's camera flashing... A thrum ran through her house, her floor groaning softly rippling from her nose toward her rear, toward her: then her hair fell, her boots fell. There was gravity on the floor. No, the wall?

She could still feel the tug of the planet before her; her top still fluttered like it wanted to float away in the free fall but the grate was holding it, holding her... Before she could figure it out her house screamed, all of her jets firing. The white skinned girl spread her feet instinctively, planting them, holding herself steady as the force of gravity increased, pulsed. Montgomery Scotty yelled a series of words she didn't know as his assistant pressed into his lower abdomen as the g forces swung around and then the tug of the planet was behind her and receding but the pull of the floor remained. Her house...was making it's own gravity? Shaking her head slightly she resisted the immediate conclusion that her house was magic. Federation engineering magic.

She pulled her boot away and almost overbalanced as it separated from the deck easily. It wasn't magnetic, then, there was none of the local tug and it was very weak, maybe half of what Altamid had used to hold her to itself and walking on that planet had always felt like springing around on perpetually new shoes. She bounced along to a rear facing window and looked out. There hung the blue white curls that made the sky of her prison, its curve rapidly becoming more apparent. Her grin slowly faded into a neutral stoic line. She couldn't help but hate that world. It had trapped her. It had killed her family and it had made her a killer in turn, but, still, it had been the home of her home for so long. A third of her life maybe. There was the tug. The instinctive yearning for home in the deep bred knowledge that in this universe shelter is rare and scattered.

Montgomery Scotty walked slowly up behind her and placed his hand on her shoulder. Her muscles coiled in response, surprised at the sudden touch and she turned to study him but he stayed very still looking out the window and she gradually relaxed. As moments go it was nice, at least up until he spoke, "Are ye okay, lassie?"

She tensed and turned her finger pressing into his chest, "I have been fine, just fine, for months through whole season's changings without engineerings from Federation to pack me in."

Despite a slight wince, which she was not going to feel guilty about - she was not, the black clad man didn't turn away. "Aye, well. 'Tis still a hard thing leaving behind familiar skies. I have been stationed many a place with many an unsavory character," here, inexplicably he and the rocky alien shared a deeply confusing look both relaxed and belligerent at the same time, "it's like gravity, only," his hands fluttered looking for the right word before ending weakly with a, "not."

She studied him for a long moment her eyes gradually drifting down to the deck, the heat of her khutut alwajh fading from the hot ultraviolet of anger to a cooler almost blue tone. How did he do that? He didn't rage and lash out like all the aliens she had ever met...like she did herself. But he didn't back done either. Well, over things, yes. Not that she would have let him deny her them.

But when it came to his mates Montgomery Scotty just...carried you along with him. James T would fight for what he needed but Montgomery Scotty would just do it. He said he needed to rescue his mates and he said he would make her house fly and now his mates were flying away in her house. It reminded her of her father. They said you couldn't fly as fast as light but he said he could and then he did, faster even. They said it wasn't safe and he said it was and then he had taken her and...

Her shoulders drooped and she dug her palms into her suddenly burning eyes. "It is not my home."

"Aye. I guess not. You said, you're father?"

She nodded and lifted her shoulders helplessly, "my family." There was his hand again on her shoulder. Her fang worried the inside of her lip but she resisted flinching away again and even allowed herself to lean into the touch a bit. They watched in silence as the planet fell away, drifting out of view as Hikaru Sulu turned her house to follow Krall and his swarm.

The material of the window gained a blue hue from reflected light and a resonant whine rapidly rising in pitch began to fill the air. She cocked her head over her shoulder and saw the undulating ripples of deep ultraviolet light working up the reactor core as entire ounces of antimatter mixed - the energy pulses directed through a crystal into the warp system itself: building a charge, preparing to release a multidimensional field that would drag her house out of normal space. The nacelles surged and the transition hit her with a strange stretching jolt as her body was dragged beneath, out of space, into a sustained superluminal bubble.

More memories flickered, racing through her head. She, still so small, wriggling out of her mother's lap to hold her father's hand while he explained how his ship, the Përpjekje, worked. Most of the words had washed over her beyond her understanding. What she did understand was that her dad had made the ship bubble sleeker so that it was more fuel efficient and so the science general should stop pestering him so much about fuel expense.

Of infinitely more importance to her, then, was the fact that they were really going out to Vëllai i Madh, the farthest planet from Shans dielli and the only one whose orbit was outside of her people's home world, Bariq. Just the night before he had taken her to the university and they had looked through the big telescope and seen the swirling storms and curling bands of color that painted the small marble in the sky, looking exactly like it did in the holoposters.

And then she was going there. Inside his ship for the first time ever since it had been completed, even if he had gotten to go lots of times. The space agency had sent one of their leaders, a science general she supposed, whose hot rippling khutut clearly broadcast his anxiety about their upcoming flight. But her daddy had made twelve trips already and anyways he would take her family if it wasn't safe.

And it was. The reactor had come online normally bathing the whole cabin in glittering ultraviolet ripples. They had been pulled away out of space and into the gleaming iridescent bubble of the outside and whisked away. Everything had worked perfectly. But everything had gone to hell just the same.

Her eyes stared unfocused at the rear of the same gently rippling space bubble as her house made a wake through the outside before her attention was drawn away by Montgomery Scotty walking away, pausing here and there to study one of the new banks of panels that had sprung to life when the newly reengaged reactor core had returned her house to full power. She listened to him and his assistant talk about something called tensor fields and their strengths while huddled over a couple of screens placed on an arch near the core.

She eventually wound her way over to study the panel, pawing at her nose. The thought flickered that something was off, punctuated by a hard sneeze that actually sprayed one of the screens. Her khutut flared with embarrassment but Montgomery Scotty didn't comment on them, instead frowning he asked her if she had caught Keenser's cold. She shrugged not sure what it meant to catch a temperature but not caring enough to pursue it.

Her fingers stroked over the screen tracing the mottle of colors ranging from soft violet through blues and into greens before fading into blackness. "What means these colors?"

She watched as he drew in a breath and exchanged a look with his assistant, Keenser she repeated in her mind trying to memorize the name. "Well, they represent a projection of the warp fields static tensile load along the curvature of the local manifold..." he trailed off looking at her, "they represent how stable the warp field is."

She nodded understanding this - a little at least. Her father had said something similar once. Something about conditions in the outside place changing and that was why they needed the science general to approve more funding for better computers that could keep up. "These blues are what we like to see," Montgomery Scotty continue, "they mean the field is brae and smooth and green means that nacelle's differentiated pattern selector can keep up with the modulation but these yellows and wisps of red," his finger slid over the black portioned of the screen, "have me a wee bit worried."

Jaylah furrowed her brow trying to follow as his fingers slipped into darkness catching onto to the salient word, "worried?"

"Aye, well. For now the inertial dampeners are handling it but I would nae suggest taking the long way about."

"So flying my house is breaking it?" She looked at him sharply placing her hands on her hips as he made a sound that she didn't quite understand save that it wasn't a denial. "You said that you could make my house fly, Montgomery Scotty."

"Aye, and I did. Here we are, out and flying, but the _Franklin_ 's been gathering dust these last hundred years and that's after taking an almighty wallop when she belly flopped on that heap of rock yon. I'm sorry I cannae have her floating along as smooth as a duck on a lake, but I am nae miracle worker." The engineer said, the fur above his eyes pulling together and his voice matching her own irritated tones.

Keenser walked back and touched a panel on the rear wall the ambient illumination within flaring at his touch. "Aye, here," agreed Montgomery Scotty his words still coming in a quick clipped huff, "a schemata of the Franklin's structural integrity. This screen is for the saucer and this is for the engineering section, such as it is. Same rules. Blue is good, red is bad."

Jaylah opened her mouth to say something back. She was annoyed. Why was she so annoyed? Because this was her house and her head, it would not stop aching. She took an unsteady step, her palms digging at her eyes again when the voice of the pointy eared one, Spock, she was pretty sure, chased away the gathering storm, "the swarm are utilizing a coherent harmonic frequency with each ship representing a unique note in order to calculate the position of each craft within the swarm..."

The pointy eared aliens voice continue in monotoned counterpoint to the more inflected voice of James T Kirk but Jaylah and Scotty after sharing one quick grinning look had already moved off to implement the plan. Jaylah pressed her feet into the grating soaring across the six meters in two quick skips, fingers skimming across the music screen looking for her favorite screamy thumpy music while Montgomery Scotty disconnected the cable leading to the mouth and redirecting it...elsewhere.

Moments later intense bursting flickers of light sparkled throughout engineering as the windows let in the strobe-light effect of the swarm ships careening into each other. Jaylah stumbled, disoriented, as her world changed into a series of still images. Even traveling at only a few light seconds per hour the collisions released bursts of energy equivalent to billions of tons of trinitrotoluene detonating...each. For a moment, Krall's dying swarm glowed as brightly as a star.

Flying through the heart of such a conflagration was not without consequence to the Franklin. Sparks and smoke flew through the confusing, flickering, air as the core surged, struggling to power the polarization of the hull plating to resist the radiative heating. Montgomery Scotty said more words she didn't know when the numbers on one panel crossed from hundred of k to thousands of k before fading to black. Both he and his stony assistant dashed from station to station tapping commands, altering settings, the drone of the core easing briefly each time before working up to an ever shriller note. She fell, sliding as the floor dropped away from her, her house turning faster than the magic could hold her to the deck she supposed.

Her nails failed to find purchase in the metal flooring as she fell sideways, catching the small assistant alien just as her house rapidly decelerated almost as if it had hit something. She smashed into the wall feeling her cushioned shoulder protector compress and then the bone of her shoulder deform and spring back, the tissue around it swelling into a severe bruise.

Pulling herself to her feet and loosing Keenser to attend to his duties she saw that she was in front of the hull integrity panel. There were no good blue lines left. There were still large swaths of green but it all faded toward black toward the outsides and especially toward the fore. "My house is breaking!" she yelled to the world at large gripping the railing, willing her house to hold together - to be okay.

This one thing. This, her house. Her one thing. Her most important thing. Her home. It had to be okay. She held onto the railing calling to her engineer when the panel started beeping. "Why is it doing?" she demanded. Montgomery Scotty glanced at the keening display briefly as he raced off to somewhere else.

"Thermal warning" he gasped pointing at what she swore was a black space above the color ship diagram picture before calling over his shoulder, "they are flying the damned thing through atmosphere. I told him she was ne'er designed to do that. Made in space I said. Clearly, I said it. Space. Ship. What does he do? Bleeding flies it out of space. Again. And now I am supposed to keep us from blowing up?"

"Blowing up?" she moaned. Her house... The light through the windows faded to black mirroring her mood.

"Space. Ship." he yelled, stumbling his way up some stairs shoving up a lever before grabbing the railing. Instinctively, she mimicked his action, clinging to the rail by her ship's health readout as the deck ran up to meet her; her house swinging up vertically from its last trajectory shuddering hard as it, apparently, ran into something thicker.

More of the screen went black and the green bits seemed to squinch down as if the front of her house had buckled. Before she could realize the implications of this, three distinct sharp claps flew through engineering but not from the electronic mouths; she could feel the over pressure waves as they moved through her chest blasting from somewhere high up the ship.

The magic that held her feet to the deck died and her boots slipped. She slid backwards onto the wall with the hull integrity panel. On her hands and knees she watched in shock as three circular black blots spread out from the middle fore of her house. For a couple of seconds all she could see was sparks as most of the panels and lights in engineering flared. Then darkness rained. Her mind struggled, sluggishly trying to keep up with the stimulation overload. Her head pounded and her heart raced. She sucked in a breath but it felt like there was no air to be had. She coughed wetly. The darkness... it meant...that...the core had gone quiet. Her house. It was dead.

She almost didn't notice when her house tipped forward depositing her hard, sprawled upon the floor. Her chest ached and she drew in a long ragged breath, pushing herself up onto hands and knees, barely connecting the heart broken wail filling her ears and the burn tearing at her throat. Her eyes burned and wetness coiled down her cheeks. Stunned, she drew her fingers over her eyes and stared at them. Tears. She honestly hadn't known she was still able to cry. To a degree, it startled it back to her senses; showing too much of any kind of emotion was deadly dangerous.

Slowly, slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, her muscles trembling. Glancing about, she saw Montgomery Scotty standing close by looking at the crushed...no. Flicking her eyes down she saw Keenser looking into the distance holding out a fabric square at her. Khutut alwajh flaring in embarrassment she took it, dabbing quickly at her eyes and under her nose. Glancing away while she waited for her running nose to still, she looked out the window and saw her house was in water. The reason it got dark in the windows earlier was that they had been flying under water her mind categorized uselessly, unconsciously fixated on the point because of the apparent impossibility of it.

She was about to return the fabric square when another sneezing fit rocked her. She probably didn't need the hand Montgomery Scotty put on her shoulder to remain upright but she didn't flinch away either. Much.

"Lass, I am worried you really did catch Keenser's cold." The small rocky alien's face drooped a little at this and it made a small whining sound that Jaylah took to be apologetic. The alien pointed at the fabric square it had given her and gestured at her before pulled open its pocket to show that it had a stack more.

She nodded gratefully before opening her mouth to inform Montgomery Scotty that she was not cold when the communication thing in Montgomery Scotty's belt chirped at her. Her hand flashed out catching the device while the engineering was still stuck in his thinking face pose. She flicked it the way James T had, only the top part only swung open and didn't go flying. From a small voice inside she heard running feet but nothing else happened. She stared at it in consternation. "Speak," she demanded.

"Scotty?" James T's voice came out slightly breathless and curiously inflected at the end.

"Aye, I am here captain. I take it our wee belly flop did not drown all the vermin?"

"Krall" was all Jaylah heard James T say before dropping the communicator and springing from the engineering room. Everything in her body felt off and she felt like she was trying to breath through her trap mud but the ridiculous lightness of the gravity helped and she stumbled ahead hands gliding on the wall for balance.

"Wait, lass, wait" came Montgomery Scotty's panting voice from behind her. "Wait, you pure bawheided..." But she could not wait. Krall. Not again. He would not get away with taking everything again.

She knew her house. Knew it measure for measure. Knew exactly where the center of that first radiating fatal black blot would be and even in the almost pitch black...blurry...wreckage knew exactly the fastest way to get there. Stumbling around last the corner she saw it, the black metallic spike driven deep into her home's skin. Piercing its polarized armor. The nose of it was split open, having already disgorged its loathsome master.

Boots, lying on the floor. She knew what she was going to see. Knowing didn't help in the slightest. Her mouth twisted in irritation at her own selfishness when she realized in relief that she did not know the first shrunken corpse in black. The other, however, in the blue flaring tube was one of Bones McCoy's nurse doctors. She had given Jaylah a glass of water when she returned from the beaming with James T.

"Christabol, Alice," Montgomery Scotty shouted falling to his knees upon finding them, pressing his fingers to the tube wearer's neck. He pressed his lips to hers trying to breathe for her but Jaylah laid a hand on his shoulder. "There cannot be helping for them Montgomery Scotty. It is too late."

The engineer rounded on her saying nothing but the look in his eyes almost made her step back, instead flared up. Her hand flickered out, grabbing the engineering by his second outer black shirt and lifting him to his feet. "They cannot be made living. Krall took all the living out of them. They will not breathe by putting breath into them. Helping is not helping. We must be stopping Krall or we will all be not living."

Jaylah watched as the human's face fur pulled together. His skin first went almost as pale as her and then darkened, black patches forming on his cheeks. Wary, unable to interpret this, she watched him trying to find newer better words. She needed him to stop Krall. All her engineer did, however, was pull open his communicator, some of the paint a little chipped from where she had dropped it, and growl three words, "Where is he?"

Hikaru Sulu's voice came back, "The Captain has left the Franklin, pursuing Krall. They're in the plaza heading for one of the high rises." Nyota Uhuru's voice broke in, "Scotty...Krall has the device. We think its still active."

Montgomery Scotty muttered something under his breath, but she was certain she had misheard him. She certainly didn't see any blood on him anyhow.

"We need to get there, fast," her engineer said, turning to her, "we'll use the transporters." She grinned, elated that a Starfleet engineering needed her help. But using the transporters was silly. She pressed two fingers into her mouth between her fangs and whistled, khutut alwajh flickering cheekily before darting into the open craft penetrating into her house. Montgomery Scotty stuck his head in around one of the nose struts peering in. "This? Are ye sure?"

She didn't bother to answer sliding her fingers systematically over the panel in front of her: lights flared and the engine roared to life, water fell from the ceiling and wind blew in her face, the seat slid from beside the control panel to directly behind it and receding allowing Jaylah to brace her backside against it while her fingers continued to explore the panel. Finally, with the hiss of escaping pressurized gas, the opened nose module began to slide closed. The green eyed alien yelped and hurried into Krall's craft.

The interior was cramped with two but not unworkably so. Jaylah gripped the two bars that were mounted on either side of a manipulable stand. While she tried to decipher the controls her wrist accidentally twisted and she yelped in surprise as the small ship shot backwards out of the gore of her house and into the strange inside sky.

"Do ye know how to fly this thing, lassie?"

"No."

"Aye, wonderful."

She pushed the control stick forward and shrieked in surprise as the view in front of them arced down to point at the ground. Still screaming, she pulled back the bar twisting forward under her hand. The craft shot forward, nose slowly arching up. She saw the statue rising in front of her and she tried to avoid it, she really did, but the mining craft were agile in the sense that they could completely come about at speed in a few tens of meters. She wasn't nearly at the limit of the craft's speed but three meters still weren't nearly enough.

Montgomery Scotty moaned rubbing his face as the two of them lurched forward buffeted by the sudden impact. "I am beginning to think the good doctor has the right idea about flying, I will breathe a lot easier when… Wait, breathe" he said, almost too quietly for her to hear before abruptly snapping open his communicator, his voice shooting up in volume and pitch. Snapping open his communicator, "Chekhov how, no I'm certain, Captain! He is headed for the main air distribution complex. If he makes it there every breathing thing on Yorktown is dead."

"Great. I'm working on it Scotty"

"Great! Great? How is he saying great? I do not want to be dead Montgomery Scotty."

"No more do I, lass. We need to help him; we need to make it to the control room, quickly"

"Which one?"

"That one, up there."

She twisted her head around to peer where he was pointing, blinking treacherous eyes that would not focus. Taking her best guess, she pulled the nose of the craft around and snapped the hand grips forward grinning ferally while the thrusters wailed, entirety drowning out Montgomery Scotty's voice. That didn't stop him from gesturing, however shaking his head rapidly from side to side and crossing his arms at the forearms in front of his face.

However, even if she had understood all the nuances of his message...and she was pretty sure the general thread centered around the concept of "no"...it was much too late to stop. The mining vehicle cut across the atmosphere of Yorktown under seven and a half g's of acceleration. It streaked across the gap in less than 4 seconds, the condensation cone presaging a sonic boom already beginning to coalesce. Transparent aluminum is a wonderful thing, stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum but nothing is meant to stand up to almost 500 billion joules per square meter.

The spike of the mining craft smoothly parted the invisible metal, impaling itself into the side of the skyscraper. The interior of the craft rapidly filled with with a diffuse foam, the precursor of the stone foam trap that had caught James T and Pavel Chekov, cushioning the deceleration to survivable, if not necessarily comfortable, levels. Long eye teeth worrying her lip she eyed the panel trying to find the symbols that had moved the seat and opened the nose before settling again on the touch everything until something useful happens approach.

Montgomery Scotty was still muttering as she finally managed to engage the boarding subroutines Krall had hacked into the swarm craft depositing the pair of them onto the carpet (and dust) covered floor of a long thin room. Jaylah's eyes immediately began to burn worse than ever and she would have doubled over into another helpless sneezing fit had the engineerings' long fingers not curled around her wrist, tugging her forward. They both stumbled forward into a lurching run, Jaylah tugged along and the alien briefly stumbling back when his arm pulled taut against his grip.

"Ooch, lassie, how much do you weigh?" he complained, but Jaylah merely shook her head neither able to talk through her coughing fit nor having any idea how to convert mass from her system into federation "kg"'s...whatever they were. Besides, she wasn't certain the question was entirely polite.

They made their way for most of the trip largely unimpeded. Montgomery Scotty waving his sleeves in the air gesturing at them and shouting at the few blurry shapes that crossed into their path scattering them easily enough. Jaylah tried to pay attention, she really did; getting lost was beyond a dangerous state of affairs but the farther they ran the tighter the iron bands that had begun encircling her chest upon leaving Altamid grew. As they rounded one last corner, however, into a much wider if just as long room they were finally challenged.

"Halt, or we will be forced to stun you." said a perfectly calm neutral voice.

"Stun me and we'll all die you bloody eejut" Montgomery Scotty replied neither calm nor neutral. "I have to shut down the main air intake."

"The station is in lock down. Protocol dictates that no non-command personnel are to be admitted onto..."

"I am command... lieutenant commander Montgomery Scott, SE 19754 T, chief bloody engineer of the NCC-1701 Enterprise!"

"Protocol dictates that no non-command personnel not registered to this station..." the voice amended still entirely monotoned.

"Aye, look, you can take your protocol and stuff..."

"Personal insults will have no effect on -" the voice began but Jaylah had had enough. Her Montgomery Scotty needed to get past these blurs so she would get him past them. Pulling her second to last holographic emitter out of her belt pouch she tossed it down the long room, planting her feet and springing forward swinging her jury rigged muazza albal'zima like a staff careful not to discharge any of the stored compressed plasma. She heard Montgomery Scotty shouting for her to stop but between the ridiculously low gravity and the spinning in her head it felt like she was falling sideways as much as bounding forward her feet barely skipping against the floor.

Beside her the holographic emitter projected three flickering copies of her self fanning out and "attacking" the gathered security officers. They leveled some kind of hand held device at them and the air was filled with trilling hums. One of them glanced across the insulated padding padding that protected her shoulders but even the back scattered energy from what ever invisible beam they were firing jolted her body, making her muscles all cramp painfully. She focused on the opponent who was standing a little ahead of the firing line, both because he was the only one her watering eyes could, more or less, clearly make out and to demoralize the remaining squad of four? Probably four.

She feinted with a potentially lethal overarm sweep before opting for a much more restrained forward thrust toward the alien's middle. But the creature didn't even seem to react to either. Rather, he leveled his hand device at her holographic emitter and the three dancing Jaylah's vanished in a short burst of sparks. His off hand lanced out, fast! faster than any of the federation aliens she had yet seen and caught her forward thrust.

There was definite resistance against her jab but it came far to late to meaningfully change the outcome. Her metallic staff slammed the dark skinned alien's hand hard into his middle forcing his breath out. The creature folded satisfactorily to its knees mouth open clearly thoroughly winded.

Then her engineer was there snatching at her weapon waving down the four remaining combatants. Behind them loomed a shouting shape that she hadn't notice emerge from the door behind the guards. She missed the start of the exchange, her breathing labored and spots dancing in front of her eyes. Montgomery Scotty tugged at her weapon again and she reluctantly surrendered it as the pitch and volume of his conversation with the shape gradually relaxed.

Lifting her head she tuned back into the conversation, "...can't. There are a lot of back ups and redundancies governing the thing that, you know, keep us all alive." This new alien looked more like Montgomery Scotty only rounder. It sounded like he was still arguing but he was allowing her and her engineer to enter waving back the still somewhat winded alien, who on closer inspection vaguely resembled the mate probably named Spock. The black clad being raised an eyebrow but did not otherwise object.

Montgomery Scotty's hand was on her shoulder and he steered her into the room. Displays blazed here and there and many anxious aliens were milling about. Many, many aliens. More than she had seen in any one place save, briefly, in the transporting room before all of the mates had dispersed. It made her decidedly uneasy but her companion pushed her forward, aiming for a large central display. At first she thought it was a large holographic emitter like her people used back on Bariq but then they passed beside it and she saw it was only projected onto a flat display. It seemed surprisingly old fashioned in the midst of all these other technological miracles.

Montgomery Scotty pushed her into a rolling chair next to the display with a snapped, "sit." She was confused. He sounded angry but why should he be? She had just fought for him. He slipped into the seat bolted to the display and, lacing his fingers together, pressed them forward the joints separating audibly. His foot caught the wheel of her chair and he brought her in close. Newly limbered fingers flew over the command board beneath the display causing it to flicker wildly with icons and text before a blue wire diagram came up on a gray background. Small near squares, with one partially extended line forming a small rectangle on their tops blinked into existence on the side of the display with text beneath them.

"You keep an eye on the diagram and tell me if anything changes." She nodded, her lungs fluttering unable to draw in a full breath and each gasp felt like she was sucking it through deep valley murk. Still, the adrenaline flooding her body helped her concentrate somewhat as she trembled trying to fight off an anxiety attack. The last time she had sat in front of an important panel she had been responsible for everybody losing everything.

Montgomery Scotty turned his attention to the small squares. "All right you wee beasties. Lets see what we can do to break you." His fingers touched the first square and the screen split, half showing Jaylah her display half showing a long column of text. The alien's finger flicked along the text his eyes twitching as he scanned through it. "Aye, there" he grunted jabbing his finger at one point of the text splitting it and typing in a few characters of text. He swiped it away and she saw that the box had disappeared from the screen. He tapped the next one scanning, grunting, and deleting a single symbol. That one too went dark.

The chirp of a communication device came from beside her and she reached to retrieve his communication device from his belt, but as Jaylah's fingers touched it the a hum of many voices came directly from the little pin on Montgomery Scotty's shirt. Then, "a little direction," James T's voice requested.

"He's headed for the air circulation processor. Big spherical chamber."

"Look up" she suggested.

"I see it." James T confirmed. She guessed that he left the communicator open, or at least she could hear foot steps and beeping and hums emitting from Montgomery Scotty's shirt. She kept her eyes glued to the display shaking her head hard every time the motes swimming through her version threatened to crowd out her sight entirely. The alien beside her worked steadily, sometimes adding text to and sometimes deleting a character or a line from the script behind the squares. Either way, he was steadily turning them black, maybe two thirds of the list had gone dark when, between one head shake and the next, she saw a blinking black dot working up into the middle of the display.

"What's that" she demanded pointing.

Montgomery Scotty took a second to glance over. "Weapon's in the chamber. Captain we have to stop that processor now or everything breathing in Yorktown is dead."

"Yeah. I think I have got that at this point. I'm working on it, Sco-."

Jaylah's eyes went wide as she heard James T's voice cut off gurgling, meaty thumps that she recognized as connecting blows filled the suddenly silent room before the transmission cut off with a crackling snap. Krall, it had to be Krall. Her head bowed. James T... He had caught her. She had jumped and he had caught her. Montgomery Scotty's hands continued to dance over the controls four squares to go. Three. Two. One. Abruptly the circles in the corners of the diagram in front of her began to pulse between pale blue and black. The entire diagram shrank revealing a second one depicting a large fan surrounded by blue green lights.

"The computer overrides are offline" the rounder alien said, "but the manual controls are still active. Here. He touched one of the black spots. There is a silver level behind each of these. You have to switch them off."

"I'll go," Jaylah said trying to force herself to her feet but her legs gave way immediately and she collapsed into the chair coughing violently. She wiped her now thoroughly soiled square cloth under her nose again trying to stem the irritated burning mucus.

"You aren't going anywhere, lass" Montgomery Scotty was frowning at her. That wasn't right. His face looked nice when his mouth was flat but this was...wrong.

And he was wrong. She had too. Levers. Krall was going to kill them all. "I have to."

"The captain will see to it."

"You don't know Krall. He's killed him."

"Nae. Captain Kirk is made of stiffer stuff than that."

She looked at him skepticism and grief writ large across her khutut alwajh but then with another chirping prelude James T's voice sounding healthy and strong filled the room. Jaylah gasped in surprised relief. "Scotty!"

"Captain, I think we can redirect it. There is a sealed compression hatch that will let you manually vent the weapon into space. Now we have over ridden the locks from up here but you will have to activate the manual control."

"So I just have to hit a damn button?"

"Its not a button sir. Its a silver level under a white panel."

"Got it."

"There's fore of them. Once you have readied the hatch you will have to exit the chamber immediately. If the hatch is open when the processor cycles with you in it, your going to get sucked into space."

"What happens if the hatch isn't open?"

"You get sucked into a giant fan with the weapon and we all die."

Jaylah gripped her piece of the console her muscles trembling world spinning violently. One then two then three of the blinking black dots stayed black but it was taking so long. She looked at Montgomery Scotty anxiously hoping to see his earlier confidence but his face looked angular and hard. It was not reassuring. Bones McCoy's broadcast opinion that James T would not make it didn't help.

Panting she watched as the second display image started to blink black and green the fan in the picture to the side beginning to spin. "The vent..." she moaned and then steeling herself to draw in a breath of the knife sharp air shouted, "Get out of there, James T!"

"This last hatch won't open."

One of the blue tube wearing aliens in a corner piped up. "Its the computer. It recognized your last over ride script as unsafe, sir, and its holding it in an overflow buffer not allowing it to execute. The magnetic lock on the manual release won't disengage otherwise!"

"Scotty!" James T shouted, grunting.

"Work fast Captain, time is running out." He was glanced over a black part of the display. Maybe there was something on the grayer background. She wasn't sure. It was so hard to focus. "He's not going to make it"

Not going. Not allowing. Power. She didn't have enough power. Power to make things go. Computer wouldn't let it go. Power. Computer. Did federation computers need power. "What if we make it not on?"

"What?"

"Computer. What if we made it not on?"

"Yes...that would work..." the blue tube said, "only... there are almost as many fail safes keeping the computer on as life support."

"Power." She gasped, her world reeling "undirect the power."

"Yes, shut it down. Black out that entire sector."

"One of the back up computers would activate almost instantly"

"Aye. A computer that is not holding my subroutine in digital purgatory."

"Do it" the rounder alien said.

Blurs of motion scurried in her peripheral vision even as the foreground all faded to white. James T grunting "No, no!" Then screaming. Jaylah slipped from her chair. Krall had won again. They were all going to die. Montgomery Scotty and all his mates. She couldn't save them. Everyone was going to die all over again because she just wasn't good enough.

She fell back on the floor her head bouncing on the carpet, James T's fading screams... She lost control of her body. Muscles trembling out of her control, limbs flailing. Montgomery Scotty's voice calling her name chased her down as she tumbled away into unconsciousness.

Something was wrong. Hands were on her, carrying her somewhere. The world hung, spinning beneath her. Her eyes burned and her vision swam fading in and out as motes...

* * *

Something was wrong. Her big brother, Benhamin, wasn't there. No...yes he was. He was right there with her mother and her little sister, Eilah. No, that wasn't it. Vëllai i Madh, the wise older brother, it wasn't hanging out the view port. That meant her father and the science general were arguing. There wasn't anything to see, that's right. No that was wrong. Her father's recalibration to make the warp bubble sleeker; it had let the Përpjekje carry them out of the Shans dielli system entirely and into the nearby nebula, the necro cloud - some 21 light days in just over 5 hours.

Her eyes were killing her and it felt like she trying to breathe through a towel. Her father was saying that it was okay. They just had to wait for the interlockerthingies to degauss and then they could just warp back the way they had come. Everything was going to be okay. Nothing was going to be okay. Her father said it was going to be okay and she went limp into the hands carrying her.

Time had passed; her surroundings had changed. The lights were brighter now, but all she could see was a disorienting white glare. Her lungs labored frantically. Air. There was something wrong with the air. Glare, the light, the swarm. Her house, her house was breaking. Thrashing, she tried to free herself to go rescue her house but more hands came and grabbed her dragging her along...Manas come to drag her back to the quarry, the cave, the low place, the place of death.

She tried to open her eyes but they burned so. Pure terror flooded through her. Her eyes, what had they done to her eyes? Blindness was death on death on Altamid, any weakness was, really. She dug her eyeteeth sharply into her tongue to still the scream, stilling the retching coughs. She tried to break away, to flee, to find a river and wash her eyes, but her muscles were confused, trembling. Her fingers were starting to spasm and she couldn't make them stop. Her wrists held by the hands, pinning her arms to her sides, they couldn't help but see. Krall would see. He would suck the life from her. Manas would kill her for weakness. Her father was going to be so disappointed. The hands, they lifted her boots into the air. They were carrying her away. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, her torso aching, contorting, her diaphragm starting to bruise from repeated coughs and sneezes.

Time seemed to hang in the necro cloud. Fine particles of dust collided with the ship from all sides, producing a soft hiss just at the limits of Jaylah's hearing. It was a little like the hiss of her mother frying fatty breakfast meats in the distant kitchen as heard through the cocoon of her pillow and comforter. She had been afraid, at first, when her father explained to her what the sound meant but he had taken them over to the radar station and dragged her into his lap. The screen glowed with swirls of ultraviolet, shifting from deep to near, he said, as the computer estimated the relative kinetic energy of the local cloud. "There is nothing out there bigger than a few microns, pet. Përpjekje's skin is thick aluminum…Përpjekje has strong armor, like one of the Knights but better. That silly dust can bounce off us forever and it won't ever do a thing but polish us up so that we gleam, okay?"

She nodded, not entirely understanding but willing to go along with her daddy as long as he seemed calm and confident. Her legs weren't quite long enough to reach the floor when her daddy picked her up and placed her onto the stool bolted to the radar work station so she folded her legs in, sitting lotus style in the adult sized seat. Curious, she alternated between watching the shifting colors of the display and glancing around the cabin. The interior was a little cramped width wise but it was very long. All and all it was fairly comfortable. The walls were painted white and extended up just to the reach of her fingers when she stretched out on her toes.

The bottom half of the walls were lined with an endless series of drawers each with a little knob you had to twist to release the bolt that held them closed and a little placard listing the contents inside. Next to each item was a small dial that you could click down with your thumb when you removed one. Set here and there along the wall above the doors were computer panels, like the radar display she was sitting in front of, as well as all sorts of lights and switches. Each was neatly labeled with its function allowing you to control how power moved through the ship.

Earlier, before they had taken off, her Daddy had been telling the reporter people about redundancies and how his creation had two or three ways of doing the same job in case one of them broke. Beyond the walls, the ceiling arched overhead. Where the ceiling and the walls met ran a long strip of blue LEDs, angled so that they shone the silver metallic coating of the ceiling above diffusing the light evenly through the entire room.

This smooth even light stood in counterpoint to the seemingly random blue pulses of cherenkov radiation as the energy from tiny little bits of antimatter was forced to travel...elsewise...down the warp reactor core lying sideways along the Përpjekje's beam. The flickers gradually began to come faster as her daddy readied the ship to warp them back home.

The top of the core extended into the cabin space but was covered for much of its length by wide repeated arches so you could walk from the right side to the left quickly enough from pretty much anywhere. The rest of it extended into the engineering crawl space beneath the panels of carpeted steel that made up the floor.

She wasn't moving any more. Squirting through her streaming eyes Jaylah tried to figure out where the hands had taking her. Gone were the familiar curving walls and grated floors of her house. Had she been outside at one point? Outside? Was she still on Altamid? She squinted, above her... shadowed faces surrounding one very bright central light. Grey expanses, walls? on either side...she should string her hammock across them she was so tired.

Focus. She held her breath letting her head fall back eyes spinning looking across the space she was in. It was wide and square, blurry darker patches adorned what she was almost certain were the walls. Blinking furiously, her vision cleared slightly as she held her breath. Beside her were tall long and very narrow soft looking tables with much smaller tables metallic? next to them. That tickled something in her memory but the need to exhale the carbon dioxide in her lungs became overwhelming and her world flared in hacking and pain and delirium again.

Jaylah's eyes followed the split of the floor forward to where it came together right before the cabin space. There, sitting in one of the big comfortable takeoff chairs, was her mother holding her sister, Eilah, in her lap, braiding her hair. Her mother had brushed her sister's hair, still the deep rusty black of childhood, back from where it surged up into the spaces between her khutut alwajh (hey, Jaylah's hair wasn't still black...not really...she had found a couple of wisps of adult white growing in even if her daddy did insist they were spider webs).

The khutut on her sister's face were a soft even near blue as she cuddled, but Jaylah caught the occasional flicker of hot ultraviolet in her mother's markings, betraying her internal unease. She could just hear the two of them singing an old lilting ballad about a foreign King coming to rid his ally of a terrible monster. The king and his 14 warriors braved the terrible dangers of descending into a valley and slew the giant murk breather that dwelled there.

Her mother's voice was softly melodic and soothing while Eilah hadn't quite managed to learn to add tone to her words yet. Still, she shouted along with the rhythm, giggling, swinging a pretend sword and momentarily drowning out the menacing hiss of the necro cloud. Turning slightly in her stool, Jaylah folded her arms onto the console, pillowing her face upon them and fell asleep to the sound of her mother's voice.

But her dream had become a nightmare hadn't it? A nightmare for so long. But, no, aliens. Aliens had come into it and made her house fly; they had rescued her or had she rescued them? They were...they were...who were they? She fought to remember, something something, blue green eyes, her mates, everyone she had ever mated with was dead? coming for her, coming for her, beam me up. Stirring weakly she shook her head from side to side trying to clear it, fighting for lucidity. Her mind latched onto that last idea repeating it over and over in a thick slurring mantra. "Beam me up. Please, please, beam me up."

A voice, familiar. "Just lay easy, lassie. You're safe. You've beamed home." Something, one of the dark spots split turning gray coupled with a wooshing sound. "Its about bloody time. What the hell's..."

Her father. He had come back and was standing there before her shaking her. No, he was still standing with her brother and the scientist general in the rear of the cabin talking anxiously about something while under the pretext of making food. No, he was shaking her pointing at something behind her animatedly, his khutut flickering so hotly that they almost faded back to black. His mouth was open but he wasn't saying anything. Why couldn't she hear him? Because he was over in the distant corner whispering with her brother obviously. He was right there index finger jabbing at the screen.

Why wasn't she looking where her father was pointing? Why was she just sitting there sleeping in the chair. Something important was happening on the screen and she was just sleeping there. Her daddy was so angry - gesturing behind her. There, on the screen, one then five then many; hot angry greed dots screaming through the ultraviolet nebular mist. She opened her mouth to shout, to warn them, to tell her Daddy to engage the warp now! But she couldn't, she was sleeping and it was all her fault.

Another voice brusque yet warm and soft somehow. "All right darling, all right. We've got you. Don't fight me now. Its..." She never heard what it was. The hands heaved and she was falling, an electric tingle passing over her skin, humming, a tingle of static electricity in the air, inside her, filling her, the taste of ozone subtle but caustic on her tongue, then her head burrowed into the shockingly soft ground and her world spun back into blackness.

The impact threw her meters through the air, smashing down on her knees, feeling the bone flex into a deep sprain almost breaking outright. There was no sound, just a single solid shock wave that tore everything in her father's ship to pieces.

Cabinets burst open, electronics flared, sparking, some even exploded - tongues of flame devouring the wire coatings within. In the desperately flickering light of the mortally wounded Përpjekje she saw that there was something actually piercing in through the skin of the craft. She stared dumbstruck and then started to scream when the craft split open. Deep virulent green light poured out streaming in toxic shafts around the emerging form of him.

Benhamin rushed at it but there was a flare of light. Her mother was shrieking. Benhamen was falling, aging, drying out before her. Manas looked at her. Right into her eyes and he grinned. In his eyes glittered countless torments, pains, deaths. Her dream shattered in denial, her world exploded in pain, her body convulsed in horror drawing in a sharp breath. One breath to many. Something in her broke and her entire body flailed, her right side screaming in pain as it battered, burning against an electric wall, seizing out of her control. Consciousness was ripped away and she fell into an infinitely faceted diamond each face holding a moment of agony: physical or emotional, pure and eternal. Manas. Stripping everything away from her. Stripping away her family, her innocence, her childhood, her soul.


	2. Chapter 2

_AN: All rights are retained by Paramount Pictures._

* * *

Scotty held his breath, watching this Commander Finnegan as he weighed his options. He was already deep in the woods: countermanding a bridge quarantine, authorizing the brute force shutdown of the primary life support system keeping a half a million souls alive, and now, on the suggestion of a white haired alien who had assaulted the chief of station security, Finnegan's equal in rank, he was being asked to authorize literally pulling the plug on the main computer. The computer that controlled absolutely everything that happened on Starbase Yorktown. If the secondary computer failed to shoulder the slack immediately the death toll might not be meaningfully less than if Krall were able to successfully deploy his weapon. And it would all have been on Finnegan's shoulders.

Not for the first time, Scotty thought back with relief to the moment when he had actually burst out laughing in an admiral's face when the stuffed shirt tried to offer him a command promotion. He had been sentenced to a line of backwater burgs for that but, looking at moments like this, it was worth it. He was made for puttering about fixing this and that or calculating multidimensional transporter vectors along a warp field trajectory or maybe distilling a cleaning agent in a far dark corner that nobody save himself was apt to inspect.

Stuffing himself into torpedoes or pulling starships caught in the gravity well of an entire planet out of an in-atmosphere death spiral or making deals with knife wielding quines with a temper like an Orion spirits merchant who has found out that his Altarian Brandy has been swapped for a load of Klingon joq tlutlh, was the galaxy's way of getting back at him. Not that Jaylah looked up to waving a feather, let alone a shiv. The white skinned alien had been looking decidedly gray since their...inventive...entrance into the command spire.

"Do it," Finnegan commanded, and Scotty was momentarily distracted by the small horde of ensigns scurrying about the command room disabling the dozens of subroutines that would each insist on stubbornly arguing that suicidal procedures were not, in fact, examples of best practice.

The evidence of the command staff's success was subtle. The lights didn't even have time to flicker before the auxiliary computer compensated for the increased data throughput. That was fairly typical, actually. Either things worked right away or you were dead before you realized something went wrong. Scotty let a breath go as the last blinking red folder flicked on again and then settled into a steady red. The modified subroutine had been implemented.

Just one more thing. Scotty watched anxiously, willing the Captain on before cheering with everyone else as the display around the fan finally, finally, turned red; the fan monitor depicting the blades slowing as the spaceport snapped open. The blinking red light that indicated the bundle of anomalous scans that were Krall's weapon zipped across the screen and was shunted into space.

Then Kirk was shouting, yelling in denial. Good God, had he been sucked free? Scotty spun, hands flying to the keyboard about to undo his revisions when he was struck hard in the chest, knocking him backwards over the chair. What was? Jaylah! Her body was convulsing, white froth building in the corners of her mouth. Her skin had gone from gray to blue. What bloody cold could do this?

Her mouth was open gasping like a landed fish but no sound was coming out. In maddening counterpoint, people were still cheering all around him. McCoy's voice could be heard whooping and Kirk was asking Spock what he would do without him. It was all noise, blowing over the red clad Scott.

"Jaylah? Jaylah! Come on, lassie, come on. Donae do this to me now." Scotty tried, with little success, to hold the girl's flailing muscles. The cheering quieted in a spreading ripple of realization as people became aware of the unknown alien sprawled upon the floor. Hands were suddenly there, helping him, heaving the girl onto her side, their owner grunting with effort as he struggled to hold her thrashing legs.

Scotty, pulling his red uniform top off to fashion a makeshift pillow, looked up. It was the Vulcan security commander. Jaylah's back arched tortuously, straining until Scotty was sure it must break, and then with a whimper her body stilled, muscles relaxing. Scotty leaned over the beautiful alien, brushing his hand across her face, smelling the sharp chemical scent of acetone sweat as he pressed his wadded up shirt beneath her head. Strangely, she actually looked slightly better after the seizure, but her eyes were still rolled back almost entirely and she was already beginning to cough again.

"-otty? Scotty, respond." Captain Kirk's voice sounded anxious over the intercom.

"Dammit, man, what the hell is going on over there?" McCoy's voice was sharp enough to, if not shake the engineer out of his shock, at least spur him into answering.

"Jaylah...collapsed. I'm nae doctor but I think she just had a seizure of some sort."

"I would concur," the Vulcan chimed in, "her behavior was consistent with a typical tonic-clonic episode. I suggest we transport her to a medical facility immediately."

"Oh really. Do you think? You know, kid, everyone you introduce me to winds up trying to die on me and I have to go gallivanting off to save them. It's what leads to me whizzing around in death traps like this."

"Oh, you know you wouldn't have it any other way, Bones."

"Wouldn't have it...wouldn't...I would have it every other way!"

"More pertinently," Spock's unruffled voice interjected, "as central routing has already informed us, the automated pattern locks that enable site to site transportation have been disrupted by a power failure that induced a system wide computer restart. That, doctor, is what I believe lead to your whizzing about in order to intercept the Captain manually."

"In that case," the security chief responded, "it will be necessary to carry the suspect to one of the transporter alcoves. I suggest the transporter bank next to the turbo lift at the end of the command plaza as it is the closest."

"Well, get on with it, man" the doctor admonished over the intercom.

Scotty grunted, trying to put McCoy's words into action before gently lowering the girl back down. "That's going to be a trick; she must weigh well over a hundred kilos."

"Then we shall divide the load." The Vulcan said, nodding his head at one of the two security officers guarding the inside of the door. The tall (for his species) and burly raven bearded Tellarite eyed Scotty, looking unimpressed, "Well, with you I know I'll be shouldering much of the weight."

The chief engineer bit back a spluttering protest. For a Tellarite, he knew, that had been a positively cordial greeting but this was still not the moment to test his commitment to interspecies relations.

The ensign in a blue dress uniform, the one who had altered him to the snagged subroutine, stood as well. It was Scotty's turn to look dubious; the human girl was even shorter than the Tellarite. "I've got her head,"she insisted, suiting actions to words as she cradled the engineer's discarded shirt behind his fallen friend's head. Scotty shrugged, more interested in bringing Jaylah to the infirmary than in the method of conveyance, and heaved with the remaining trio.

Commander Finnegan looked momentarily nonplussed to have members of his command staff volunteering themselves to new assignments but nodded his assent. "Lieutenant Gramsci," a curly headed bespectacled human manning the central tower control panel stood up, "Please assemble a first contact package and escort ensign Frisby and company." Finnegan ordered. "Don't forget to collect our visitor's effects. Oh, and Gennaro? See if you can get me a report on just what the hell has been going on."

The makeshift litter of hands was perhaps not the most elegant method of conveyance ever devised, with Scotty and the Tellarite awkwardly shuffling sideways and the Vulcan steering from the back while Ensign Frisby skipped backwards as nimbly as she was able. Nevertheless, it got the job done. It wasn't all that different from lugging in a new trititanium line interlocker, Scotty reflected. Well, except that interlockers didn't twitch or whisper in their sleep.

"Just hold fast, lassie. We've got you. It's going to be okay, you hear me? You're going to be okay." Jaylah's eyes fluttered and she muttered something before going completely limp in their arms. Scotty cursed as she got that much harder to carry and then again when he was able to hear the wet bubbling quality to her breath that had been previously obfuscated by the sound of her voice.

Scotty dragged his rescue squad along, the Tellarite's insults gradually becoming less polite and more pointed as they panted their way down the antechamber. The comm officer, bless him, ran on ahead, heavy first contact packs and Jaylah's staff clattering the whole way, and placed one of the three transporter pods on standby.

Staticy glowing motes shimmered into existence before Scotty's eyes the moment he crossed into the transporter chamber. The calm, open and mostly empty plaza of the command room antechamber sang and shimmered away as the transporter chief spooled him into stasis as the rescue squad fed Jaylah into the disintegration phase of the of the carrier wave. The world they returned to was none of those.

The chief engineer, still not quite fully formed, ducked as a two and a half meter tall orderly laden with two large plastic crates blundered past. The over worked creature calling a hasty apology to the patch of air that had been perfectly clear when he had started to move through it. Equally in the creatures defense, there weren't a lot of clear patches to chose from. The sickbay resembled a battlefront triage hospital. Only the even white lighting and the white washed walls reassured Scotty that they had been beamed to the right coordinates at all.

Jaylah began to thrash almost as soon as she had coalesced. Her flailing arms lifted Scotty and the Tellarite off their feet and smashed them hard into something behind them. Falling back to lay supine on the hard floor, the white haired girl immediately began to choke and retch while she clawed at her eyes. Anxiously, Scotty and the security commander dragged the young woman into a sitting pose and pinned her hands down to her sides. This evidently helped her breathing, a little, but her eyes remained glassy and staring; set amidst a few thin runs of ultra dark red almost black blood.

Scotty looked around the room for help and spotted a young Asian woman in lilac scrubs wending her way toward them. "Hello. I am Nurse Eileen Koh. Oh," She blinked at the Vulcan security commander, "Good afternoon Commander Sunak. This is, uhm," She glanced at her handheld briefly, "Jaylah, correct?" She asked, waving her PADD at the stricken woman."

"Aye," Scotty nodded.

"She just popped up on my list of new arrivals. I have here that she suffered a grand mal seizure in operations, but other than that and... a security alert? her file is completely blank." She turned her hand held computer so that Scotty could see the mostly blank screen. "Can you fill in a few details for me? Species, age, gender, history of the condition, that sort of thing?"

Scotty paused, "Well, we encountered her on Altamid where she had been stranded. I do nae know her species...or her age really. She is female."

"Right. Do you, you know, know that, or are you just guessing."

"I." The Scott turned very red indeed. "Lass. What kind of question... I, no, I have nae checked, but," he waved his hand at Jaylah's lying form.

The nurse went a little pink herself, "A medical necessity I assure you," she said, managing to keep most of the squeak out of her voice, "So, unknown species, planet of origin, Altamid, morphologically female. Is there anything you can tell me?"

"I do nae think Altamid was her home planet. Merely where Krall took her."

"Krall? Oh, you are with the Enterprise?"

"Aye, Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer." He watched the nurse typing information into her PADD, "I thought at first maybe she caught Keenser's cold but what kind of cold can cause symptoms like these?"

The nurse shrugged. "Without some kind of species baseline I cannot even begin to guess what kind of symptoms are normal. But I will put her down as flagged for possible isolation." She ran a small beeping probe down Jaylah's side commenting, mostly to herself, as the alien's file updated, "Typical central encephalitic nervous system, bones: a polychloroethylene and dibutyltin thioglycolate matrix, quadrapulmo respiratory system, hmm, I doubt all this fluid is typical, and a distributed cardiovascular system. Mass: 135 kilograms."

"Aye, and what does all of that mean when its laid out in the manual?"

"Honestly? Not a lot. I don't have any baseline to compare any of this to and it will take a more in depth scan to learning anything really detailed. Her bones in particular are largely opaque to this scanner. I am seeing a lot of fluid in her lungs but," she stressed, "that could be normal, and anyway, I am not a doctor I am just gathering facts so they can make a prognosis. I'll see what I can do to move you up the triage scale. Simple seizures sort fairly low. I would typical administer a mild sedative and muscle relaxant to prevent any secondary injures but...unknown species means exactly that."

"Doctor McCoy will know what to do when he gets here." Scotty said, as much to reassure himself as anything else.

She pursed her lips, "She has a preexisting physician?"

"Aye, we were on comm with him when Jaylah collapsed."

"So he has already been consulted?" She glanced at the security chief who nodded.

"Well..." She hesitated and tapped a few commands on her PADD, "I don't have him registered on staff. That was Leonard McCoy? You are certain that he is coming, soon?" Scotty nodded and she bit her lip and then tapped in a few characters, "Okay, I have listed him as her attending physician. That should speed things up when he arrives. But, this also takes her off the triage list so, listen to me, I am not allowed to issue a diagnosis but I am, very, concerned about the fluid in her lungs coupled with the seizing. If something happens or he doesn't get here soon call for me, nurse Koh, and I will put her back in rotation. Do you understand?"

She held Scotty's eye until he nodded decisively. She sighed. "It isn't how I would ordinarily do things but..." She waved her hand through the air indicating the stuffed emergency suite; it was clearly already filled far beyond capacity with casualties in all levels of distress. There was something of a gradient as the merely bruised lined the walls, either standing if they could or else perched as gingerly as they were able on thinly padded emergency chairs. A ballet of mostly pink and blue scrubbed figures passing out hypos for pain or offering words of comfort. Nearer in were rows of hastily assembled canvas triage biobeds where young doctors worked setting broken bones and splinting sprains. The hissing sound of self setting plaster forming a constant background hiss. Immediately before him, the normally in use biobeds were filled with unconscious patients surrounded by grave faced doctors. Turning around, he saw the wall Jaylah had just acquainted him with. Peering through the transparent polycarbonate he saw an equally bustling surgery suite.

Peppered here and there among the injured were the familiar faces of the Enterprise crew, dozens in total, almost all of those that he had been able to beam to safety. He was a little relieved to see that most were on the far side of the injury gradient. Starfleet escape pods were pretty rugged but their designers could not have anticipated them being physically intercepted by a swarm of attack craft piloted by reckless hooligans.

This sea of welcome faces, and Scotty's own throbbing wrist, reminded him not to dwell too long on the fact that only the lost were the uninjured, however, was entirely swamped by an ocean of strangers. There were those sporting the spelled burn patterns of gamma radiation from Krall's incinerated fleet as it leaked in from slow to polarize viewports. Others had been sent flying when the mining vessels had struck the Yorktown and the more seriously injured of these also exhibited clear decompression wounds. In the surgery suite, there were even some poor souls who had been in midtransport when the primary computer had gone offline.

Jaylah spasmed violently her head striking the transparent plastic hard enough to star it. Her body jerked violently, her ribs expanding and contracting but the bubbling sound was gone. She was choking! The Vulcan dropped to his knees, grabbing the alien by her white lips and pulled open her mouth. Scotty snatched his shirt from miss blushing I've-got-her-head ensign and used it to swab the red flecked foam from Jaylah's mouth not letting his own breath go until he heard heard inhale a rattling breath.

But even as she drew that breath she coughed, expelling more red tinted foam. It wasn't a lot, each time, but it was enough where she'd drown if he left her. He heard the comm officer, Gramsci, and the security officer, Sunak, calling for help and he lent his own bellowing voice to the effort calling for nurse Koh. But, twisting to look over his shoulder, nowhere in that mass of people seeking assistance could he find anyone free to render aid. Starfleet they might all be, sure, or at least species friendly enough to trade with or visit a Starfleet space station but they weren't crew and right at that moment he would have let them all burn to save his friend.

He knelt in front of her, alternating between keeping her mouth clear and smoothing the hair back from her face. He tried to catch her wheeling eyes and to speak soothingly to her. Having no idea what to say he settled on breaking down how the speakers that played the music she enjoyed so much worked and how to repair them. Jaylah seized two more times and he pulled off his undershirt handing it to the ensign with a muttered "pillow". Else, he road out her seizures calling for help. It wasn't until Jaylah was pulling out of her second episode, however, that a voice finally answered him.

"Scotty!"

"Captain! We're over here!" And then there was Spock, making his way toward them warning the milling crowd away while a very battered looking and grim faced Captain Kirk limped along in his wake.

"Mr. Scott, need I remind you that section article 1 of the uniform code of conduct dictates that all officer shall adhere to the proscribed dress code unless given specific exemption by their commanding officer?"

"Aye, aye, and you may quote the whole song and dance to your heart's desire once you help me."

Jim knelt down and gingerly touched Jaylah's neck. "How is she doing?"

Scotty just shook his head.

Spock opened his mouth, took a good look at the stricken white skinned girl, and then visibly seemed to reconsider his words. "Of course. I believe he was waylaid by another doctor. I will go see if I can assist."

Doctor Leonard McCoy was many things: an excellent physician, a devoted (if absent perforce) father, a Starfleet officer, and, apparently, a halfway decent pilot. That still didn't mean that he like to fly, however. At all. It wasn't that the craft was particularly hard to fly. On the contrary, the control scheme was fairly intuitive, and after spending the last few hours learning it, he was flying with reasonable proficiency if not grace. No, the problem was the incessant litany listing all the ways they could die: pasted against the front by a sudden deceleration, the flesh plated from their bones by a hull breach, incinerated in a fuel malfunction… He tried to tune it out, listing the nerves of the face: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear… but that just left both recitations running simultaneously in his head. God, he could go for some of Chekov's whiskey right now.

To be fair, it wasn't as if things hadn't been going well, the controls had barely jerked in his hand as Spock caught the captain and he compensated automatically (which he would swear to his seventh glass he had accomplished without any inane whooping). Also, of course the Captain was falling through the air, when hadn't James Tiberius I-should-have-been-born-as-a-bird Kirk not been leaping into the abyss since the day he met him? The two aforementioned miscreants had shuffled into view. The hobgoblin looked vaguely pensive but would no doubt pass it off as the ship's lighting or some such while McCoy's ex-roommate, bruised from head to toe with a particularly nasty contusion developing around his neck, was grinning from ear to ear.

He had immediately begun to nose his craft back towards the ground because, ultimately, and this was the real crux of the matter: humans just weren't meant to go winging through the sky like a colony of vaguely intelligent bats. Not that he had any intention of returning to Earth (save, perhaps, to visit Joanna); the idea of breathing the same air as his ex-wife could stress him to the point of developing hives. Not that the larger space ships were that much better but from the windowless confines of his sickbay he could indulge in some willful denial. No, his plan had been to keep his feet on terrafirma...just, another terra. But for the bartender cutting him off one drink sooner he had wound up in the same shuttle as a Midwestern punk and somehow the trip still wasn't over.

And then the chief engineer was shouting. Something about Jaylah, the captive alien on Krall's little world, the one that trapped Jim in instafoam, and didn't she deserve a medal for that. It wasn't that Scotty was calm exactly, but he always ranted with a smile in his voice. This tone...well, fortunately, the doctor thought, he was safely ensconced in sickbay whenever Kirk's latest design pushed Scotty into this serious and slightly alarmed "no really we are all going to blow up" voice. And why didn't the alien that owned this ship stash a damned bottle of bourbon somewhere in it?

Now he was flying over the streets of this glittering ball of hubris floating in the black fast enough that he had to compensate for the curvature. Why exactly did they let the demented descendent of Escher and Fabergé attend architecture classes? He swiveled his head around, looking for this hospital that Scotty was talking about beaming to, because hey, if there was something wrong with the young woman why not see what complications they could throw in by intentionally deatomizing her, but none of the buildings he could see were labeled.

Better still, Jim, Spock, and Sulu were all shouting directions. Contradictory directions. While the stations flight crew were simply begging him to stop. Really, anywhere was fine, they assured him, just get out of their skies and they'd call it even. "Dammit, I wasn't born on Mars. I can't actually fly ninety degrees from everywhere." He groused to the world at large.

Finally, he caught sight of it, or at least the cloud of flickering emergency response shuttles. Lots of emergency response shuttles. Bulky lumbering shuttles. Directly in his path.

"Clear the deck!" Jim shouted.

McCoy cursed and twisted at the controls, forcing the mining craft to perform a drunken sort of triple axel through the mass of ships. He throttled back as much as he could but the vehicles still blurred as he shot passed them. Then he saw the strobe light ringed landing platform, maybe a kilometer and a half ahead. "I have no idea how to land this thing." He informed his two cabin mates, calmly...considering the circumstances.

"I would suggest deploying the landing gear" Spock offered, because of course that was helpful.

"I'm...not actually sure this thing has landing gear." Kirk put in, even better! "On Altamid, Krall had them all docked in some sort of cradle… tower… thing…"

"I see. Well, in that case... In any event, doctor, we have approximately 14 seconds to... interact with... the landing platform. Otherwise, 12 seconds after that, we will be subjected to your aerial acrobatics once again."

"Well, there is one good thing about this. If I die I get to take you two with me."

"Half true. Vulcan's are considerably more resilient than humans. I would most probably survive."

"Wonderful," McCoy yelled, his voice lurching along with the mining vessel as it bounced across the landing pad like a flat stone skipped across a lake. The heavy jagged metal tearing rents in the aluminum oxynitride surfacing. They rattled and spun sliding half way along the pedestrian access ramp to the shuttle lot. There wasn't a lot of hissing or steam, compressive heating at 250 km/h is pretty negligible, but it meant that they could hear every rending scrape as they racked up several month's wages a pop.

When they were quite still, a somewhat pale faced Kirk yanked open the access panel Spock had used to catch him, and stumbled out. "Spock. Before I become the highest ranking busboy at the Starfleet cafeteria, please take an ongoing order."

"Of course, Captain."

"If that... man, ever, sits at, no, touches, the helmsman station, shoot him."

McCoy extracted himself from the death trap with as much dignity as he could muster, carefully not listening to the Vulcan's reply as he straightened his uniform and made for the automated door into the hospital lobby. The lobby reminded Bones of the actual hospital he at done his residency at. Sweeping grandiose wasteful caverns radiating the mystical gravitas of the medical profession, cowing the uninitiated, impressing upon them the superiority of the doctors. Good God, this place even had marble columns. The trio's footsteps echoed as they crossed through the antechamber to one of the sets of doors leading into the medical complex. He vaguely noted one of the receptionists starting to stand, but once his combadge came within range of the automatic doors they whooshed open. There were advantages to having a specialist degree attached to your identity chip.

The lighthearted banter of the three comrades shifted gradually into mission mode. Jaylah might not be one of their crew, not yet. But she had fallen in the course of saving them all and that made her a part of the team. More, McCoy was feeling the weight of the deaths left in Krall's wake. How many had they saved? Less than sixty, maybe much less, out of a crew compliment of eleven hundred. Jim, he knew, must be dying inside.

So he didn't say anything when Kirk, perhaps a little unnecessarily, moved to take point, head swiveling, alert for danger. Spock trailed behind, tapping computer panels as they passed, steering them through the long hallways. For himself, he was reviewing everything he knew about Jaylah. Which was...not a lot. Her skin and hair were very white and lustrous which suggested a climate in which concealment was not important, or was very foggy or snowy. All three of which were belied by the distinctive black markings on her face. She was largely humanoid but his liver-hearted Vulcan friend proved that that didn't prove anything. The seizure Scotty described wasn't dangerous in and of itself, not unless it became very chronic indeed, but it could be a sign for a number of deadly underlying conditions.

No, what worried him the most was the wet sound to the coughing he had heard in the background. Pulmonary edema could be deadly, in a hurry too. He frowned. He had been treating Keenser for a paleopulicem infestation that might possibly have been transferred to the young woman. It would account for the symptoms, but he doubted it. She just didn't have the craggy look of a high silicate species. And there was the fact that she had perked up during her fight with Krall. Granted, adrenaline was a hell of a drug, but if it was a disease organism he would have expected her to crash much faster, her body's defenses having been deferred into the combat.

Something about that niggled at him. She had perked back up. That meant she had been off before they decided to play cowboys and motocross? Well, come to that, yes, she had. She had seemed weak the night before the attack and had been growing steadily more withdrawn since the humans...and demihumans...took over her ship. True, that could be, almost certainly was, partly psychological. Jaylah's attempts to interact with the crew, however clumsy, spoke of a social species and most social creatures handled prolonged isolation poorly. McCoy wasn't clear on how exactly Jaylah had wound up on Altamid but he got the impression from Mr. Scott that she had been there for a long while.

Which meant that she had been exposed to any number of human and Vulcan diseases while they were working on their plan and he was itching to inoculate her to within an inch of her life. But it still didn't sit right. Few diseases moved straight from woozy to pneumonia and seizures. Diseases that virulent tended to die out quickly because their victims didn't have time to spread them. And besides, the chief engineer had coaxed the life support systems to life the first night he had been there. McCoy had remembered the delicious feel of air waking him up replacing the thin humid fog of the backwater they had been dumped on. Antiquated as they were, the biobuffers should still have removed that vast majority of all pathogens from the air.

No, wait. The environmental systems had kicked on. Changing the partial pressures of the atmosphere on the Franklin. Gaseous toxicity. He would bet on it. Probably. There were a few tests he could run to rule it out at any rate. And to try to figure out which gasses it was that were driving her system into trying to drown herself to escape from them. Okay, yes, that was a bit of a leap but not that big of a one. Different species evolved under slightly (or very, but few sentient species evolved on non-m class planets) different atmospheres. And the window for acceptable breathing levels, particularly over long periods of time, tended to be fairly narrow. Why he had just heard something about the Federation getting off on the wrong foot with a new species called the Breen because of an environmental mishap.

All of which meant... McCoy picked up his pace, half trotting passed Kirk. Partial pressure imbalance disorders: nitrogen narcosis, carbon monoxide poisoning, chlorine scalding, oxygen toxicity, all of these could be deadly if left unattended to. He tapped on his combadge intending to ask Scotty a few questions to see if he could refine his working theory but instead of the normal double chirp he heard two quick flat notes. Damn, the local comm system must have crashed from too many people calling in.

The ambulance bay they had...parked at...was closer to the trauma rooms than the main emergency center so they had to traverse a fair distance through the hospital, but once they were passed the first few turnings, and thus past the branches that would take them to maintenance or administration or any of the other essential but demonstratively non-medical activities a hospital must engage with daily, the route became direct enough.

Of course that meant that they had to pass by the evidence of their fight with Krall. It was a small mercy that between the surgical drapes and the wall of doctors and nurses it was usually impossible to tell the identities of the occupants in the rooms they passed, but, occasionally, a face would be visible hooked up to a respirator. In one memorable glance he had seen Nurse Chapman with half her face marred by a chemical burn. Good God, the last time he had worked with her he had chewed her out for breaking a vial of some crewman's blood in the centrifuge because she had forgotten to reslot the counterbalancing sleeve. The Captain's face morphed from set to stony to grim.

McCoy blinked when they parted the last doors leading into the emergency chamber proper. Not because the place looked like a war zone. After the last couple of minutes he was expecting that, although the sheer scale of it momentarily took his breath away. No, rather it was the covey of nurses and orderlies who descended upon him barking information about patient status and triage reports and trying to force paperwork into his arms. He had no idea what was going on but he knew enough about how the medical profession worked to understand that taking on any paperwork constituted acceptance of dealing with what ever said forms were about.

"Look you pack of chattering harpies, I already have a patient. Jaylah, white...everything, would have come in company with Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott". The pack surged forward, chattering angrily. They didn't like being called harpies, evidently. Jim waved his fingers between himself and Spock and then to his eyes and turned to head off which could mean – anything really. But Bones hoped it meant that he and Spock were going to go look for the engineer and his new alien assistant.

"Is there a problem here?" McCoy glanced down. There was a short round faced man smiling falsely at him. The man's eyes, however, radiated a general unfocused anger at the world at large. "I trust you are finding everything in my hospital satisfactory, Doctor, um, let me see here, McCoy is it?"

McCoy sighed, his hands going up to massage his temples. He didn't miss the emphasis this little troll had placed on the word my and seriously doubted his name had taken quite that much time to look up. So, a failed doctor who got shunted sideways into administration. Save him, he knew this game: if you waste enough of the interloper's time they will eventually give up and go away. But he didn't have time to play this game, well, ever really, yet that went doubly so when he already had a patient to attend to. "Yes," he said, meaning it to be a response to all three questions and turned to follow the Captain and first officer.

"Fine, fine." The administrator said, stepping into his path, "then if you will just sign in we can all get to work."

McCoy snorted, "As if the system didn't automatically log me in the moment I entered the hospital." He shook his head and extended his hand waiting to sign whatever PADD the chief handed him but the man only spread his hands.

"One of the orderlies will have it. At the bottom of the duty cycle."

He opened his mouth to be diplomatic, he really did, it just got lost somewhere on the way to his tongue." Look around, man. You have bigger problems then engaging in a testosterone pissing contest with me. You are in a crisis setting, you need all the help you can get."

"Good, then sign into the duty roster!"

McCoy snatched one of the PADDs held by a young orderly who looked like he wished, desperately, that he could be anywhere else. His eyes scanned down the treatment list: stretched anterior tibial ligament, fisher of the oral vermilion, abrasion of the... McCoy snorted and tossed the PADD to the side, "I cannot imagine what state your medical program is in if interns here cannot see to sprained ankles and split lips. I would repeat that you need help, but I think I would rather diagnose who ever signed your medical license with cataracts. Clearly, some qualified physician was turned down by mistake and the moron in front of me got the sheep skin. Now, get out of my way, so that I can see to my patient."

The doctor quivered with rage his face actually purpling as he choked on his words. "I am not in the habit of furnishing confidential medical files to unknown vagrants who walk in off the street."

McCoy sighed, "Computer, confirm log in and identity of Starfleet lieutenant commander, medical corps, Leonard Horatio McCoy, serial number H23WP-HUKQG60 authorization code 95 Victor Victor 2."

"Voice print and authorization code confirmed. Doctor McCoy has been active on site for seven minutes, current assignment: Hospital Charlie."

Spock returned, eyebrow quirked mildly at the, typically unnecessary, identity check. Bones noticed a particularly set look to the half Vulcan's jaw. "Is there a problem here?"

"Little lord Fauntleroy here doesn't want to-"

"Little lord... See here young man. You barge into my hospital, and demand to see my patient registry. When you finally deign to release your credentials I acquiesced."

"Acquiesced? I still don't have the damn registry. What I do have is some nonsense about a triage list, and look, my patient isn't on the list."

"If you want to practice medicine in my hospital then you must sign onto my medical team. I do not want some rogue hotshot-"

Spock reached over and removed the PADD from the ranting man's hand. "Interesting, Doctor, it says here that you have slated her for an urgent transfer to Q and I."

Q and I, quarantine and isolation. He took the proffered PADD and very, very, carefully did not blink. There was his name signed as the attending physician and, yes, she was still listed as an active case. There was also a request for an isolation room, a high resolution bioarch tuned to a broad spectrum pulmonary sweep and an order for a variety of potent diuretics one for each of the common species types. He grunted, somebody was thinking at least. McCoy's thoughts spun and he shifted his approach abruptly. "Well, of course I ordered an isolation room. Any disease that can jump from silicate to carbonaceous lifeforms must be extraordinarily virulent. To do any less would be the height of medical negligence. Any ethics board would have me before them so fast I would think I was doing rounds again.

The two chief medical officers stood staring each other down. Both knew that their counterpart was playing them. It came down to who could hold their bluff longest, and Bones had been playing poker with Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Sulu for too long not to develop a serious game face. The Yorktown officer blinked first. "Fine," he spat, but I want a full inventory of the resources you use. They will be deducted from your..." he glanced down at his hands and then yanked his PADD from McCoy's fingers, "...your Enterprise's supplies."

"Naturally," Spock said, "Our vessel registration number is NCC 1701"

McCoy followed Spock towards where he had left the Captain. "Spock, won't the new ship, assuming there is one, be the NCC 1701 A?"

"Indeed, it would. But we are not yet registered to that ship. The CMO is, of course, free to attempt to reclaim any potentially lost medical supplies from the Enterprise's salvage."

Bones looked sideways over at the perfectly neutral faced officer and mentally gave him another point. One day, one day he would get the last line. His grousing, however, was interrupted by a petite ensign with unkempt sandy blonde hair in a blue science uniform that came, actually skipping, up to them. She held a black shirt twisted nervously between her hands. "Commander, Spock, right? And this is Doctor McCoy right?"

Spock nodded, "indeed".

"I'm sorry, can I help you ensign?"

"Frisby. Right, sorry. Follow me, please, Nurse Koh has taken the alien to isolation suite 13 on captain Kirk's orders."

McCoy sighed. He had heard that tone of voice used about his one time roommate before. And it wasn't the irritated one either. He waved his hand and the trio headed off.

"Lieutenant Commander Scott managed to bring Nurse Koh back," ensign Frisby explained as they wound their way quickly through the crowd, "and she suggested," the girl held up her fingers making air quotes, "that Captain Kirk authorize the alien's immediate removal on your orders. Captain Kirk just, snatched a gurney away from a doctor and he, Scott, and Sunak loaded her onto it. Nurse Koh told me to tell you that the patient had developed..." the young woman bit her lip momentarily in concentration "hemoptysis on top of pulmonary edema and that her ostats were falling."

"Osat" he corrected absently. Dammit the girl would place herself in the middle of a live fire fight only to drown on dry land. It would also complicate determining which gasses she was reacting negatively to, assuming that was really the problem, as her metabolism shifted the components of her blood, assuming she had blood, around. He was still musing on the problems when the science officer brought them to a closed door and he stumbled at the abrupt halt.

"Commander Sunak? It's Frisby. I have brought Doctor McCoy and Spock."

There was the buzz of a solenoid disengaging and the doors slid open, the ensign slipping in and heading for the chief engineer. The first thing he noticed upon entering was Jaylah stretched out on the gurney, her wrists and shins restrained by the captain and another Vulcan. She was twitching feebly and muttering something while Montgomery Scott stood over her answering back. Her eyes were open and looking at him but from their glazed darting appearance he wasn't sure how much she was internalizing. The once white skinned alien had taken on a greyish blue hue. The room was uncomfortably crowded once they had all entered. Scotty noticed the changing light and looked over his shoulder at McCoy. "It's about bloody time. What the hell's the matter with her?"

Bones, however, didn't get a chance to answer before Jaylah screamed and started to thrash violently on the cot. Scotty noticed that, unlike her first seizure, this one did nothing to improve Jaylah's color. On the contrary, the deep blue bruises on her cheekbones darkened considerably. McCoy sprinted forward and cursed vehemently as the out of control muscular contractions frothed the bloody expectorant in the girl's mouth into a deadly foam.

"Endotracheal tube!" he barked, hand extended, fingers closing on the familiar plastic tube. He grunted trying to pry Jaylah's mouth open before Spock pressed his fingers into her cheeks forcing her jaws open and Bones slid the breathing tube into her trachea finger sliding on the activator, inflating the balloon and sealing the tube. Now to do something about the seizure itself. "Cortical suppressor."

"I am sorry, doctor, I would have applied one when the patient first came in with a seizure complaint but we have had to induce too many medical comas today and we have run out."

McCoy grunted. Figures. "Do you have any c-stims?"

Rather than answer him, the nurse placed the large double headed device in his hands. A touch that he appreciated. He snapped off the back panel, revealing the controls inside. "There isn't any real difference between the two. A cortical stimulator works by reading the patient's brainwaves and projecting a sympathetic signal to augment them. Shift the signal output by pi radians"

"And it would produce an interference wave instead"

"Very good nurse..."

"Koh"

Bones smiled, having surmised as much. "Of course, real c-sups are a lot more discriminatory. Shutting down the vagal tone, say, can have serious repercussions. But if we," he flexed the band, snapping it in half, "reduce the potency of our interference wave, we can do well enough." He moved beside his patient. "Set up a complete atmospheric isolation field, we are going to transfer her onto the biobed now," and grunted as he attempted to lift her. Even with two vulcans helping and the suppressor she was able to thrash hard enough at his touch to lift him onto his toes. "All right, darling, all right," he reassured her softly, "We've got you. Don't fight me now. It's all going to be all right now. You'll see."

The transfer went smoothly enough, the electrical hum of the air tight force-field whining slightly at the edges of his hearing.

"Do you really think she is contagious, then?" asked a surprised sounding Koh.

"No, but I do mean to check on that shortly. But that wouldn't explain why I would want to put my patient in, what amounts to, an air tight box, would it? Prepare me 2 cc's of areactive osmotic diuretic and 2 of a generalized antagonist just in case."

"No," she agreed handing over the requested hyposprays, "but then, why?"

"Think about it. While you do, tune the bioarch to do a scan for anomalous multicellular organisms in the patients lungs." While she was making the arrangements McCoy pressed the diuretic laden hypospray into Jaylah's neck hoping to reduce her pulmonary swelling before putting a sterile tube in a handy hypospray and drew a few cm's (cubic milliliters) of blood. He injected the some of the dark almost black liquid into one of the bed's input ports and keyed up the omnispectrometer. "Spock, do you know how to use one of these?"

Bones indicated the automated cycle he had just begun and after a moment's study the first officer nodded. "There are some superficial differences between this and the system associated with the chemistry station but I believe I can adapt adequately."

For himself, he administered the rest of the blood to a generalized sequence base pair replicator both to scan for known pathogens (and assumed pathogens based on aberrant genome strands) and to get some sense of a preliminary genetic sequence of his patient.

"I'm not reading anything particularly noteworthy in her lungs, doctor, but there is a lot of interference from the edema."

"Well, that rules out Keenser's infestation," McCoy said unsurprised. "Spock, how are you coming?"

"The machine has offered a partial readout but has not had time to detect the more obscure molecules."

"That's okay. We are looking for some of the more common radicals. Sort by high concentrations of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide to start."

"It is difficult to draw conclusions without a norm for comparison."

McCoy grinned. "I guess you will just have to guess."

"I do not see the advantage of making up information."

"Analyze broadly," Kirk suggested, heading off a rehashing of a well worn argument between his two friends.

"It would seem anomalous that there is a higher concentration of oxygen bound in sodium hydroxide than there is in cellular iron based macromolecules."

"Sodium sequestration?" McCoy mused, interesting. "Nurse Koh, start dropping the oxygen partial pressure 1,000 ppm per second."

"I feel I must point out the paradox of increasing the suspect's oxygen concentration by reducing her oxygen intake," interjected Sunak. McCoy's hand spasmed. He did not need another argumentative Vulcan.

Koh's eyes widened in realization. "It isn't necessarily that simple commander. Too much of anything becomes poison."

"Aye, like an engine whose mixture is running too rich."

"It isn't exactly rare." McCoy added. "It is hard to beat high oxygen concentrations for supporting multicellular life, but I can think of two member species, the Axanar and the Zaranites who don't breathe any oxygen at all. Comparatively, our little chickadee here is downright domestic. How are we doing, Nurse Koh?"

"Oxygen concentration decreased to 17 percent. Her edema still hasn't completely receded but there is no new interstitial fluid leaking into her lungs either."

"Breathing the wrong kind of air can really do this?" Frisby asked

"Over the course of a few days? I would say we got lucky," McCoy confirmed.

"But it is treatable?" Scotty demanded.

McCoy nodded, indicating the oxygen saturation readout which had finally stopped falling. His patient wasn't getting better yet but at least she wasn't getting any worse. "It is going to take a while to hash out the ideal partial pressure for her species but we should be able to manage it. If its close enough to federation standard, then regular injections of a sequestration agent should suffice or else we can always fit her with a breather."

Captain Kirk leaned back. That was two of his senior officers acting as though it was already assumed Jaylah would be remaining a part of the team. The choice, was, of course hers but perhaps there were steps he could take to get her onto his team...and to make sure that actors like section 31 didn't.

Ensign Frisby frowned and stirred when nobody else seemed inclined to take McCoy up on his suggestion to leave, while he and Nurse Koh worked out the alien's atmospheric needs. Ultimately, her need to return to her duty overwhelmed her social awkwardness and she stood. "I need to return to my station. Call me when she wakes up, please, Eileen?"

"Of course, Amelia." Nurse Koh answered.

Judging time in the small enclosed room was difficult; although, having a window would not have been that much more helpful - it wasn't like Yorktown rotated near enough to any stars to really make any difference in the quality of the light, but, still, James Tiberius Kirk, one time captain of the Enterprise, was getting anxious. A child of the Iowan planes he had never been good at sitting still. He had gotten better at it; few things teach patience half so well as sitting in a captain's chair while crawling through the endless wastes of deep space, often for days at a time. Still, inactivity felt inherently unnatural to him.

He had found some ways to fill his time. He had made three rounds out to check on his crew, comforting the steadily shrinking pool of those awaiting treatment and checking up on those who were in recovery. He never apologized, there would have been no point; it wouldn't help the crew and nothing could absolve his responsibility, but he did help where he could: relaying messages mostly, taking reports from those who were in a state of mind to give one, reassuring one young ensign that she would absolutely still be able to play the cello after some physical therapy improved the flexibility in her reconstructed wrist.

At one point, Chekov had contacted him, hailing the hospital directly through the Yorktown's hardwired communication system. The remaining Enterprise personnel on the Franklin had, apparently, been ordered to vacate the vessel which had been simultaneously condemned, locked down as an active crime scene, and been chartered as a historical landmark. Kirk had ordered the Russian ensign to comply with all due haste; wanting to be as far away from that cluster of fun as possible.

For the most part, however, Kirk found himself returning to Jaylah's room in the isolation ward. After Kirk was let back in for the second time Commander Sunak had set him up with a temporary passcode. While it was difficult to judge improvement in Jaylah's condition while he was in there, he could see that Bones was making progress each time he returned from one of his sojourns.

By his first return, Spock had completed his 'spectro analysis and McCoy had a definitive diagnosis: primary oxygen toxicity with complicating nitrogen narcosis and carbon monoxide insufficiency. "Aren't carbon monoxide breathers and oxygen breathers supposed to be opposite ends of the spectrum?" Kirk had asked, a little surprised.

"Ordinarily, yes," Spock confirmed, "but this species seems to possess two hemoglobin analogs, one of which seems to be dedicated to carbon monoxide. Sufficiently so that it appears to strip the molecule from the oxygen bearing protein."

"I'm not sure that she is properly breathing carbon monoxide either," Jim, McCoy added, "it seems to be more metabolically driven. She has an organelle in her cells producing an enzyme that converts two molecules of dissolved carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide and a free carbon ion with enough energy to power an electron transport chain producing a very high energy macromolecule." Kirk quickly snuck out as the pair lapsed into increasingly opaque technobabble.

The next time he returned, Jaylah was laying under a sheet, her top having been removed, and Bones was alternately yelling at Scotty and Sunak for not telling him that Jaylah had been hit with a phaser blast and working with the nurse to figure out how to attune the dermal regenerator to the white skinned alien's biochemistry in order to heal the nadion burns. Kirk beat a second hasty retreat. Sometimes, he knew, it was better not to learn all the messy details.

By his third trip back, Jaylah's color had improved markedly. Or rather, it had all drained out to her usual white and black. The beeping jury rigged cortical suppressor was, thankfully, deactivated. The medical team had devised a compound that could be safely eliminated by her body after binding the excess oxygen dissolved in her blood. They were introducing the agent slowly, making sure she didn't suffer any sort of negative reaction but McCoy's face had relaxed considerably from its earlier tension. Moreover, he and Spock had begun to snipe at each other again. Kirk worked on suppressing his grin as he noticed that the nurse, Koh, was spared, well mostly, from his taciturn friends ire.

Deciding it was safe enough, Kirk settled in to wait as the doctor finished his wizardry. For the most part, the room was silent save for the snap of the hypo and the hum of the mass spectrometer or the hiss as the medical officers finished adjusting the gaseous concentrations, or, rarer still, an occasional murmur of conversation. Kirk found Gramsci, the first contact facilitator, a little overly enthusiastic but genuine and Sunak to be...a Vulcan. He noted that Gramsci wasn't thrilled with the security alert but wasn't overly perturbed by Sunak's presence and he relaxed a little more when he determine that nobody had been seriously injured. That was something to deal with but it should be manageable.

It was one particularly long lull during which Bones gulped down a quick glass of water, when Jim spoke up, "I do have one question, Bones. How did you get separated when you were following us?"

McCoy opened his mouth but Spock beat him to the punch, "I believe the good doctor was engaging in a human territorial display."

Bones just shrugged, opting to ignore nurse Koh's startled giggle, "I'm a doctor, not a diplomat."


	3. Chapter 3

_Authors Note: I make no claims of ownership do dah do dah._

 _So...I don't love the previous chapter. But, whatever, it's done and it served its purpose: bridging the gap between Jaylah living on the Franklin and her time at Starbase Yorktown._

 _I keep messing with the first half of this chapter but I have gotten to the point where I am mostly rearranging beats and not really making anything better. So here it is, I have fiddled with it as much as I shall fiddle and shall fiddle no more._

* * *

Her world was cocooned in the finest lace, each strand fine enough to be invisible, but woven so cunningly that the fabric became translucent and when layered, subtle variations in the weave produced opaque designs. She reached up to touch it, remembering the almost liquid feel of the fabric running through her fingers the last time her mother took her to the bazaar. She remembered the scent of the smoldering spice wood and the black expensive oiled wood of the warecart, all done over in jingle-bells and moth-lights. Lazy cart draft-cats sleeping in the sun; their huge breaths making the worm-webs flutter in the breeze. Bubbling dark yellow green straw water from the deep iron pentacarbonyl seas dissolving the adhesive from the worm-webs leaving behind the finest thread. Instead of cool lace, however, she felt a warm strong hand grabbing her own.

She startled, yanking her hand free and rolling, trying to prepare to fight. Instead, she banged her arm into something hard and electrified, judging by the jolt in her arm. She rolled flat onto the soft ground, flat on her back, panting. Which was not good. But she felt like she had when she was a child desperately running through the humid jungles of her prison home – muscles weak and trembling. She tensed, readying herself for another effort. Determination seeking to wash away her fatigue.

"Easy, darling. It's only us."

Her mind raced, what was—federation language? "You speak it again?" She requested still tense and wary. Krall sometimes spoke in federation but more often in the language of the ancients of Altamid.

"It's us, lass, from the Enterprise, do you remember?"

"Montgomery Scotty?"

"Aye, Lassie, you remember me?"

"Of course I am remembering, Montgomery Scotty. I am fully remembering but I am not understanding why I am caged." She blinked, straining her eyes. Maybe she could make out some shapes. Carefully, so as not to give away that there was anything wrong with her sight, she reached out, feeling with her palm for the wall. And then there it was humming and tingling under her touch.

"It okay-" a voice started to say but she cut it off.

"Caged is not okay." She insisted. "You uncage me. Now."

"Jaylah. It's just temporary. I promise. You were sick. Doctor McCoy is treating you and he needs the cage to do that but as soon as he is finished we will take it down I promise." James T's voice. She had been sick? Yes, she remembered now. She had fallen and the world had spun away from her. She had dreamed of the Përpjekje, she remembered with a lurch, and of Manas. Experimentally, she drew a breath. It didn't burn and make her want to sneeze like before. Her eyes weren't hurting her exactly anymore either. They felt off and her vision was beyond impaired but there was no pain.

Trust. James T was talking about trust but Krall had beaten it into her very firmly that trust was death. "How long is finished?"

"We just need to make sure that you don't have any adverse reactions to the treatment. A couple of hours." Another said, this Bones McCoy, she thought, probably.

She sat hesitating. She hadn't entirely understood the part about reactions but she had a vague sense of how long an hour was; it was 20 playings of her song.

Trust. She had trusted James T to catch her. And he did. But now he was asking her to trust him to let her go. Trust was so easily abused. Could she? She drew a long ragged breath her body actually trembling in resistance and forced it out in one quick breath, "James T, something is wrong with my eyes."

"Okay… What is wrong exactly?"

She balked, this was too much. "You can never mind it. It is not a problem."

"Jaylah, we are just trying to help. It will go much faster if you tell us what is wrong." The overwhelmed girl, however, wreathed herself in protective silence. "Okay," the probably Bones McCoy voice continued after an awkward pause, drawing out the word uncertainly, which was fine, she wasn't at all sure it was okay either, "lets try this. Can you look at the blue light, darling? Oxygen toxicity, um, air poisoning, can effect the eyes but I would have thought it would have been flushed out by the sequestration agent."

Jaylah looked, she really did, but she couldn't see any blue light. After a moment a shadow passed repeatedly through her vision. "Dammit" the voice muttered, "so by, 'something is wrong with my eyes, Jim' you really meant 'help, doctor, I'm blind'."

She flinched and then suppressed it by flaring up. "I am not the this blind. All things are okay with me."

Then there was a hand on her shoulder. The floor she was on tilted and something warm was pressed to her side. This close she could make out the green tint of Montgomery Scotty's eyes. "I'm here with you, Lassie. We'll make sure nothing is going to happen. What ever Doctor McCoy wants to do to you I am sure he will be willing to do to me first."

"He will not," the confirmed voice of Bones McCoy said the words coming louder and closer together than normal.

"What?"

"Best case scenario, the sequestrator binds all the oxygen dissolved in your vitreous humor threatening your eyesight through acute stupidity induced retinal hypoxia. Worst case scenario... I tuned this molecule to Jaylah's biochemistry. I haven't had time to run any cross species safety checks. So you will go blind as the oxygen in sucked out of your retina while at the same time your body attacks your eyes as if they were a foreign body."

"Right, so, that's a bad plan then."

Jaylah was incredulous. She had missed most of that but the voice had made it sound unpleasant and Montgomery Scotty's response seemed to confirm her fears. "You want to be doing such things to me?"

"No, its not like that," said a soft voice that Jaylah definitely didn't know. "We, Starfleet medics, take an oath. Among other things we pledge that 'the health of my patient will be my first consideration'. For my people there is an even older guiding principle primum nil nocere, first, do no harm. Doctor McCoy will not try to harm you while you are in this hospital."

Jaylah worried her lip with her small fangs. "To say it is easy..." She waited but they remained silent, not trying to convince her further. Slowly, slowly, she nodded. If she was blind she was all but helpless anyhow and, well, better to know now if these aliens were going to betray her. Or if they didn't. She sighed. Then they still could in the future, but she would be able to see when they did.

For a time the do no harm voice and the Bones McCoy voice discussed...something... coupled with the whirring of machinery. Jaylah breathed deeply. It felt, wonderful. She couldn't remember the last time she had been able to take a deep breath. There was still something missing, some flavor of her home half remembered and inarticulable but, oh, compared to the watery atmosphere of Altamid or the scalding air of the Federation, it was bliss.

After a while she leaned into where the bed sagged and the hand on her shoulder. Montgomery Scotty, she was pretty sure. She hadn't met anybody else quite so touchy. Something about that stuck in her mind, something about her shoulder. It came back to her with a flash. "My shot, it is not hurting me anymore," she blurted out in surprise.

"Aye, the doctor fixed you right up."

Jaylah's mouth fell open, her khutut alwajh flaring wildly in disbelief. Krall had stunned her and her little sister repeatedly with, what he claimed were, some of the last charges on his phase pistol. He had threatened to use the kill setting if her daddy and the science general didn't find a way to make the strange invisible alien weapon compatible with the ancients power cells. It had taken weeks and Krall had stunned her thirteen more times before it was finished. Her mother had treated the wounds as best she could but she still had the scars on her legs from the burns the weapon left behind. It had taken months for them to stop hurting and she could still feel the tugging when she kicked something as hard as she could.

"Okay, Chickadee, I'm going to start with a little drop to start with while Nurse Koh works the dermal regenerator. This shouldn't hurt at all, now, darling, at all. So if anything feels even a little bit off I need you to tell me right away, okay?"

"I will say, Bones McCoy." She said, stealing herself for the sting of something going into her eyes. But true to his word, it only felt a little damp and, it was hard to describe, tingling, like fizzing in reverse but it was so subtle she wasn't sure if it wasn't just her imagination. A strange circular flickering brightness in her sight resolved, shrinking into a small blinking blue light. She still couldn't make out what was holding the blue blinker but even that much change was an enormous relief. "I am seeing your light," she confirmed.

"Good, darling, any pain at all?" She shook her head and the Bones McCoy voice went on, "Good. We'll try a bigger drop this time."

The tingling was definitely noticeable this time but it still wasn't painful. It was a decidedly odd feeling, but it really didn't hurt. Her vision sharpened, half of the cocoon concealing her world falling away. The world appeared oddly flat due to her compromised depth perception but she was able to take in the room she was in for the first time. There was Montgomery Scotty, his hip and arm surrounded in an odd sparkling line from, she assumed, the electric Federation wall. Standing above her was a female, probably, human and Bones McCoy. Incongruously, he was sticking his hand out at her.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" He asked.

"Five" she answered promptly and then blinked in confusion as a look of frustration crossed his face, was that not the answer he was looking for? "I am seeing the five fingers on your hand, Bones McCoy. Three at sticking in the air. Two are in a circle touching. Does this finger holding have meaning?

James T laughed and shook his head in what Jaylah took to be a no pattern. The head shaking was a curious thing but the faces of all these aliens were so indistinct. They sometimes went a little paler and sometimes a little redder but it didn't seem consistent when they did it and it was such a subtle thing that she supposed they had to resort to actual movement to get their point across. Of course, she had adopted the same habits when talking with them. She felt a little sorry for them, it seemed like an incredibly frustrating evolutionary pathway. Strange that it was so common.

Now that the Doctor's fingers were no longer obscuring much of her vision she took in a little more of the room. There was the Spock sitting next to the right of the Captain and an unknown human who was apparently amusing himself by attempting to balance a great many electronic devices. A small distance away was another Vulcan. This one seemed familiar too but she could not quite place him.

After waiting, she assumed to see if her eye would really be sucked out or not, the doctors repeated the same process with her other eye. It still took longer than she thought it probably aught to, but given the warning that Bones McCoy had given Montgomery Scotty about the potential (if vague) problems, she wasn't about to complain. She put up with Bones McCoy asking her to read a chart of increasingly diminutive black federation script to him. She didn't know the name of the letters, but she did her best to sound them out. She wasn't sure she had done a very good job, however, because James T and Montgomery Scotty kept laughing at her. She was getting pretty flustered when Bones McCoy let her stop because she was twenty twenty. Whatever that meant.

Still, everything, seemed to be going well; at least until she sat up. The sheet that had been decently covering her while she was lying down, naturally fell away. She went rigid in embarrassed shock her khutut positively itching with how hotly flared into the deep ultra violet they were. She snatched up the sheet and wrapped it around herself. It wasn't that bad she kept trying to tell herself over and over again.

She had still had on her chest bindings and she had worn less on Bariq where the silken lace dresses were only really opaque over certain key anatomical regions in order to let her khutut aljism to shine through. But it had been so long since she had worn anything but her retailoring of her brother's combat uniform which hid...almost everything. And Manas, and his fingers, his eyes. She shook her head hard, casting off thoughts she did not need like shedding drops of water.

Nurse Do No Harm Koh, had set down the blinking little cylinder and picked up a black little cylinder that made her handheld computer wheetabeep annoyingly at Jaylah which really hadn't helped the small letter speaking test. Her eye fur pinched together and she gave Jaylah a very intent look. "Are you sure you are okay? It really is very important that you are completely honest with us. I just picked up a one second long luciferase analog assisted cascade in your face. It was pretty strong, I detected a depolarization surge of 28 dietary calories. And, well, you didn't look happy there just a second ago."

Jaylah drew herself up angrily. "I am not Krall. I say what is." She glared at Bones McCoy's nurse until her face changed colors. Jaylah drew a deep breath. She was trying to be on her best manners. She really was. But the Federations were not making it easy. Raised floor cages, taking away her armor...and her weapon she realized belatedly, calling her untruthful. Only the deeply ill could look one way while meaning another. "You should not be saying such things. I will not speak what is not true." She couldn't help flicking her eyes to the human one more time but forced herself to dwell on more pressing issues. "I do not feel reacted. What is cascading loos... loosy-ates?"

"I don't know," Bones McCoy said, picking up his own wheetabeeping probe and running it along the markings on her face. "My God, there are as many different compounds in here as there are feathers in a hen house: neon fluoride, diatomic argon and xenon, argon bromide, xenon iodide, xenon chloride... These are some unusual molecules period, let alone in a biological setting."

The unknown human male had gotten up and was looking over at Bones McCoy's handheld. "Interesting" he said talking very fast, "Can you tell me, if it does not reflect a cultural secret, if your markings are tattoos or natural?"

Jaylah looked helplessly from one to the other. She had thought she had a pretty good handle on the Federation language. Her home had been full of wall pictures and mouths and she had spent thousands of days on it looking at the script and listening to the voices and she had been able to put a good bit together. Granted, she had spent more time out of her home looking for pieces to fix it with from among the other aliens Krall had marooned on Altamid than she had actually resting on her home.

But she still knew what an engineering was and what a bridge was and what a light was and deck and hull and wire. She had learned more from watching the Franklin mates. They had laughed and joked and talked to each other playing a game with small labeled cardboard squares called "jin rue my". She had especially loved Mac Crosby. He was the Franklin's engineering and he kept spoken notes of everything he had ever done. She had been able to look at the text with diagrams depicting something on her home and listen to Mac Crosby talk about it and eventually worked out how to sound out the script. Mostly. Sometimes the rules were just odd.

She had just learned how very little Federation she really knew. None of what they were saying made sense. Jessica Wolff had talked about having a tattoo that the men on the Franklin all said they wanted to see but as far as Jaylah knew she had never shown them. Which...didn't help clear up what a tattoo was at all.

Bones McCoy was the first one who seemed to pick up on her distress. "I am sorry, chickadee, it probably isn't important right now. I cannot imagine them, I cannot imagine what we are seeing is coming from your medicine. Although..." he dragged the little black cylinder from the markings on her face to where they picked back up again just under her collar bone, "the density of the, um, excimer compounds drops dramatically... Never mind. Something for me to puzzle over tonight. They don't seem to be hurting you at any rate but I do want to keep an eye on them."

Jaylah was tempted to ask what he was talking about but was afraid she wouldn't understand the answer anyhow. She settled on the more immediately relevant, "I am not going to die?"

Bones McCoy drew in a deep breath and Jaylah braced herself for the worst. "No" the doctor said slowly and she almost collapsed in relief "but I still really do need to refine your ideal atmospheric partial pressures and make sure that our agent is working correctly in you or you could get sick again. And I really want to get a physical on you so we can have a healthy base line. And I am going to need to give you a full circuit of inoculations and-"

"-and" James T said, cutting off his blue shirted friend, "if you hang out with Bones too long you will find that he has an overactive worry gland. It is a human disease, we would operate but I'm afraid there wouldn't be much of the man left afterwards."

Jaylah looked at the doctor in concern.

"He's kidding, lass," put in Montgomery Scotty. "Doctor McCoy knows what he is about. He is just very cautious in achieving it."

"Remind me then, Mr Scott, to rush through treatment should your appendicitis ever return." Bones McCoy said his voice unusually monotoned.

"I think the doctor's trepidation ensures that his performance is quite adequate." Spock insisted.

"Thank you, Spock."

"Where as if sickbay responded at regulation efficiency I am certain the quality would fall beneath standards."

Nurse Do No Harm Koh gasped but Bones McCoy laughed out loud. Jaylah wasn't sure she had heard him do that before. McCoy sighed and leaned back. "I'm not thrilled about letting you go when there is still so much about your biochemistry that we don't know. But, on the other hand, I don't know that keeping you here any longer will lead to the answers springing out of the ether. And, well, I can be doing more good out there than playing staying cooped up like a badger in here. But just so you understand, I want you back first thing in the morning."

Jaylah blinked taking that in. "I am free to go" she quarried not quite daring to hope.

"Provisionally. And I want you carrying a medical tricorder with you. It will alert me if anything in your systems decides to run amok."

Jaylah took the small plastic handheld Bones McCoy handed to her holding it awkwardly. Gingerly, she lifted her sheet and peeked down. Yep. No pants either. Her lower garments were both embarrassingly darned and threadbare and decidedly without pockets. Her Khutut flared again and she made a small sound of distress.

Nurse Do No Harm Koh laid her hand on Bones McCoy's chest and pressed causing him to stumble back. Jaylah was about to ask why when she stroked a button on her handheld computer and a soft green curtain snapped down from the ceiling tenting the two of them in. "I'll get your things," she said softly and Jaylah wholeheartedly decided to forgive her for her earlier words.

The drapes rustled twice as the nurse slipped out and in returning with Jaylah's clothing, her brother's padded flack vest on top. Her fingers slid along the familiar fabric and then paused. She couldn't remember them feeling this soft...ever. They smelled nice to. Not that Jaylah hadn't washed them. She had, often, in her house's large vertical sink. Every time the rains came hard enough for her to top up the reservoir. But still, they always seemed to get dirty, immediately.

"Thank you, Nurse Do No Harm Koh," Jaylah sighed, bringing the alttaniikhfa leather to her nose again.

The girl giggled and raised the facial fur above only one of her eyes. "I ran it through the synthesizer. Its mostly for making food," bizarrely, she curled the first two fingers of both her hands in the air as she said food, "but it does a good job at removing organic debris, particularly when its deeply embedded."

Jaylah nodded, slipping off the sheet and gingerly reaching out sighed heavily when her hand passed through the space where the electric wall had been.

"You really do not like walls do you?"

"No" Jaylah admitted, the marks on her face cooling to a deep blue in remembered sadness. She slipped on her shirt, sliding Bones McCoy's plastic device, his twine-corder she thought he had called it, but she could see no twine, into her stomach pouch before loosening the buckles on Benhamin's sleeveless flack jacket and sliding it on.

"What was that you called me earlier? Do No Harm Koh?"

Jaylah shrugged, mimicking Montgomery Scotty's gesture of uncertainty, spreading her hands in appeasement. "It was what you said was important to you."

"Is that how you determine your names?"

"In part, it is so."

"What does Jaylah mean?"

"Jaylah... is my first living name. It is from my parents. First living names are not the same. They mean much but they say less." She hesitated, not at all sure how to get this across. "Jay is white. Lahwfyr is," she thought about it for a moment and ran her fingers over her pants settling them down to step into her boots. When the material was smoothly stretched out she touched it, "lawhfyr," then she scrunched the ends up and touched the ridges "not lawhfyr."

"Smooth" Nurse Do No Harm said, smiling. "So Jaylah is whitely smooth? That is very pretty."

"Yes, like the first fall of water ice...but no. That is what it is meaning, but... Jaylah is just Jaylah."

"I understand. Our names are sort of the same. My name is Eileen, but the meaning of the name is almost entirely lost, something about 'desired,' maybe. I like the name you have given me but it is a bit of a mouthful. You can just call me Eileen. Or Nurse Koh."

"I understand, Eileen Nurse Koh." Jaylah pulled on her tactical belt locking it in place, her fingers running over her pouches automatically checking their contents. She offered the human woman a smile, it was disconcerting how quickly the Federations gave away their names but it was also nice to meet a people so eager to be open. Everyone on Altamid had been so closed all of the time, including herself.

"Close enough" the human said sighing and touched something to make the curtain withdraw.

Doctor Bones McCoy had already left and Eileen Nurse Koh headed straight for the door after giving Jaylah one last quick reassuring smile before glancing down at her PADD and muttering something about "obnoxious little toads".

"I can go now?" Jaylah asked still not quite believing that the Federations would release her quite so easily.

The Vulcan Jaylah had fought with earlier stood looking like he was about to speak but James T beat him to it, talking a little fast at first. "Correct me if I am wrong, commander, but in first contact situations the onus for preventing all non-premeditated social gaffs falls upon the diplomatic staff of the most directly involved vessel."

"Indeed." The Vulcan nodded. "However, it would seem that assault falls outside of the legal context of social gaff."

"Nah" Kirk said smiling broadly, "A little physical contact is how Jaylah seems to say hello. Why when I first met her she trapped me-"

"Aye, and she pointed a knife at me"

"But in neither case were either of us hurt. And you are looking quite healthy yourself, commander. Species that introduce each other with ritualized combat are not unheard of."

"Indeed. Are you aware, Captain Kirk, that your love of sophistry has been noted on your personal record? Regardless, you seem to be operating under the misapprehension that I intend to apprehend the suspect on the spot."

"Aye, well, ye do keep calling her the suspect. That does not garner ye a whole lot of trust."

The Vulcan raised the fur above his left eye. "My intention is not to 'garner your trust' but to see to the security of this station. As the suspect, Jaylah, is the only non-documented species on Yorktown at present, and, moreover, given her past actions, it is my considered opinion that she represents the largest active security threat. Regardless, as the victim of the suspected crime I have, naturally, recused myself from the investigation. Consequently, as I had intended to say earlier, you are provisionally free to move within non restricted spaces within the Yorktown provided you agree to a security escort, at least until transporter site to site functionality has been restored. Nor are you allowed to leave the starbase until the investigation concludes."

Jaylah looked around, James T looked like he had bitten something sour and Montgomery Scotty and the man with many devices were slightly pink in the face and appeared to be studying the ground. Jaylah, however, was feeling somewhat relieved. She still was annoyed that everyone seemed unhappy that she had defended Montgomery Scotty but they weren't talking about caging her...or at least the only restricted parts of the Franklin were the bridge, the engineering and the ordinance control. Detention meant the MACO's. She knew that from the videos on her house. The federations were wary of the MACO's and she had unencrypted that one video of the interrogation of the Romulan and it still sometimes worked into her nightmares. Her other major fear, that they were to kick her out of the Yorktown didn't fit either if she was expressly forbidden from leaving the space station.

She did dream sometimes of making her way back to Shans Dielli's blue light but she had no idea where the smiling mother of luck shone. Still, she was more than surprised when no one objected to the man with many electronics returned her muazza albal'zima and baei alththulai. She ran her fingers over them, checking the compressed plasma charge and, biting her lip in chagrin, reengaged the improvised weapon's safety. Two of the bawei appeared undamaged and she thumbed the access screen checking the number of holovideos encoded within. The third one, however, was badly burned and refused to return to life at her touch. She exhaled softly, closing her eyes, there were precious images on there she desperately hoped to retrieve.

"I must warn you," the one James T called commander said, "that if at any point it appears that you are attempting to utilize your weapon or in any other way jeopardize the safety of the Yorktown or any creature currently aboard we will forcibly detain...cage...you."

"Aye, lass, you cannae go about swinging your fists here."

"When I am attacked I must let it?"

"No one here will try to harm you." The man with many electronics said softly.

"You cannot know this."

James T smiled. "Really, it is unlikely. Unless they are very drunk or happen to be named Cupcake. Security is there to cage them for fighting you just as much as if you were to fight them. There are some special rules, but the big one is do not throw the first punch and try to stop fighting as much as possible before security, the ones in red, mostly, and they will tell you that they are security, arrive."

"If it is like Manas, to stop is dieing." She insisted trying to convince them, worry churning within her over agreeing to be helpless.

James T shook is head. He laughed but he was not smiling. It was...a deeply confusing facial configuration. "I promise to warn you if another omnicidal megalomaniac shows up."

"Does that happen often?" Jaylah wanted to know.

"Aye, a bit."

"Nero." Spock said, a hard edge to his voice.

"Khan." James T said, sounding even harder.

"Regardless, all three of those incidents were handled by Starfleet personnel." The Vulcan commander paused, "Do you have military ranking among your people."

Jaylah thought about it; her father had been a member of the engineering arm of the defense guild, and consequently, so were his children unless they formally joined another guild upon reaching their majority. She had gone to the military academy with the other children of the guild. And she had been trained to run some of the Përpjekje's systems...her khutut dimming at the memory of how badly that had gone... "I was -" She thought. There had been references in the manuals on her home about how to supervise the newest of the mates, but she had never heard any of the Franklin's mates say the word out loud "cah-dette?" she hazarded.

"Acknowledged. I will update your file to indicate that you have had some training." The Vulcan paused, "Starfleet cadets tend to be fairly young. May I inquire as to your age."

Jaylah looked down, the cells on her face glowing coldly, "I do not know. I spent more days on Altamid. I have forgot Bariq days. I may be done." She touched her hair line and raised her hand a few centimeters. "I may get larger little."

"I see. I suspect lieutenant commander Gramsci," the security officer indicated the man with many electronics, "would prefer if I entered you in as an adolescent. How much training did you receive?"

Jaylah shrugged not really understanding or caring how the Vulcan was adding her in. She sat and thought about it. She had entered the academy with the other young children on her 45th month and she had been almost 53 months when Manas had brought them to Altamid so, "about 320 days."

Jaylah looked away from the Enterprise mates. She could identify the look on James T and Montgomery Scotty's face, and she hated pity.

They had been walking as the security officer had questioned her and Jaylah winced when she realized she hadn't been taking adequate note of her surroundings. The rooms they had been going through had been very narrow and long and gray. She glanced in some of the windows as they passed. A few had curtains drawn over them but most showed empty spaces with some electronics and a section of raised floor just like the room in which Bones McCoy had healed her. "What is this place?"

James T glanced at a sign on the wall. "Isolation ward 2."

"Isolation is keep separated? This place is for your caged ones?"

"Not exactly," the Gramsci said, "It's only for the sick. So that they cannot make others sick as well. What do your people do with their unwell?"

"The mjekesnaf...the doctor-mates come to your house. Maybe they say no one else can come. Maybe make cohousers leave. The not sick ones. Not more than so."

"I see. We do not hold our patients any longer than what we need to treat them." The group walked through the hospital following Kirk back toward the landing pad. There was a long moment of stunned silence when the party exited out of the hospital's ornate foyer. The landing pad was...busy. Swarms of small blinking robots skimmed along the surface knitting a last few sparking electrical lines back together and spraying an emulsion that left behind the sturdy translucent metallic surface.

James T coughed and said something very quietly. Jaylah couldn't hear most of it but she heard Krall and Swarm and figured that this is where one of the mining craft crashed. Spock turned, calmly, toward a stairwell on the side of the platform and she followed him down only to bite back a scream when he seemed to jump into space. She glanced down and swayed, all of the blood running out of her head. Down below there were tiny dots moving along the ground – people. She was maybe a hundred meters in the air. She looked away, having learned never to watch a death she didn't have to and found herself sitting down, hard. She couldn't fathom why the Vulcan would just jump.

Montgomery Scotty put his hand on her shoulder again. It seemed to be a favorite position of his. "Are ye alright, Lass?"

"I" She paused, completely confused, "am sorry, Montgomery Scotty. For your mate's death."

The engineering blinked and then started to laugh. Jaylah sprang to her feet, backing away. Were the federations all crazy? Maybe Krall having gone mad was not uncommon. She looked around for a place to run, reluctant to break her word against fighting so quickly.

The human male noticed her tensing and raised his hands looking a little wary. "Nay, Lassie, its okay. Spock is fine. He just walked over the gravity turning point." She stared at him. She knew that. That is why he fell.

"Is everything well?" inquired, impossibly, the voice of Spock. Jaylah clamped down furiously on older superstitions about ghosts.

"I am not understanding..." Jaylah admitted and then sat down again when Spock strode back into view standing...sideways...at the apex of the pyramid of stairs suspended in the air. "You can fly?"

"I see. No. The floors here all emit a local graviton field. Space station Yorktown is too small to have an appreciable gravitational pull. If you simply walk along you will find that your feet remain affixed to the surface beneath them."

Jaylah hesitated, khutut alwajh flaring hot in embarrassment and apprehension as everyone stared at her. They didn't look angry but they were all waiting on her to proceed. Reluctantly, she pushed herself to her feet. She dug her small fang hard into the inside of her lip to, largely, still her trembling and descended the last few stairs. She closed her eyes and stepped out into space, convinced that she was going to fall to her death. Even a few meters fall on Bariq would kill her, and this felt completely suicidal, however not-appreciable gravity might be here. She shrieked when air whipped past her face. And then she stopped. Her feet steady on the step. She was standing on the top of a small pyramid. There was the ground below her, the side of the building, and a cliff far ahead of her, the street, and she was standing at the edge of a canyon gazing across at that wall.

She defiantly met the security captain's gaze beneath her, mentally daring him to comment on her scream but he merely gazed at her impassively when she caught his eye. Spock turned and stepped, swinging around to the underside of the stairs and proceeded to walk up the flight that they had just descended. She couldn't help closing her eyes again but she managed to refrain from making a noise when her body swung around to reorient itself to this new down. She glanced up and saw a world of people walking far above her upside down on the sky. She kept her eyes on the ground after that.

The man with many electronics, First Contact Gramsci, as he had introduced himself, hurried ahead of her. He walked up to one yellow and black checkered shuttled docked on the underside of the landing pad, sitting upright in their local orientation. Her mind was starting to come to terms with it but her inner ear was not happy. At all. First Contact Gramsci gave the man in the shuttle a small object and then thanked him before opening a sliding door on the side.

"This is called a taxi shuttle," he informed her, "it is a way of getting around on most federation spaces, planets and the really big stations mostly. It requires less energy credits than using the transporter network but it is a bit slower. That reminds me," he pulled out a small thin plastic square. It was the deep blue of the sky at twilight and in the center was a circle framed by what she thought were plant leaves or maybe animal tracks. In the center was a starscape and beneath was some federation script.

"uhn-iyt'd feedeerayat-eyon of playn-ets" She sounded out. On the back were the letters Diplomatic Corps Temporary Credit Card

"That is very good." Montgomery Scotty complimented. "Did you pick up that while living on the Franklin?"

"My home teached me many things," Jaylah confirmed. She climbed gratefully into the small ship and sat leaning against the window. She pressed her hot face against the cool material of the window and tried to still her heart. Walking upside down, she decided, was not her favorite pastime.

The shuttle detached from the surface and fell away, slowly, toward the surface above lazily rolling until the ground and below agreed again. "The Credit Card", First Contact Gramsci explained, "will allow you to buy what ever you need while your are on a Federation world or vessel. Somethings, food, medicine and shelter we do not charge for at all. If you are hungry, any restaurant, any food store, will serve you. There are a few exceptions, alcohol mostly, but if you are ever hungry or thirsty just ask someone and they will show you where to go.

Beyond that anything else you need is handled with energy credits. There is and there is not a limit. They won't cut you off – the card will always allow you to buy what you need. For example I gave the captain of this taxi my card," He pulled out his card to show her, the front was the same as her own with the federation symbol but the obverse had Gramsci's picture and lots of small federation script, "in order to pay for this flight. You can buy crafts and arts that you like, clothing, physical items, anything really. If there is ever anything you need and you cannot find it you can ask the computer to call me and I will be able to help you out. Go ahead and give it a try. The computer responds to a variety of verbal commands" he said belatedly when Jaylah looked a little blank.

Feeling a little silly she cleared her throat and said loudly, "Computer. Call First Contact Gramsci."

"There is no registered resident by that name," a disembodied slightly electronically distorted feminine voice said. Jaylah turned to glance at the voice box making sure that the speaker was truly digital.

Gramsci coughed, his face going a little pink. "We are going to have to hash out naming conventions and maybe nicknames at some point. But for right now, computer, register new alias Lieutenant Gennaro Gramsci: First Contact Gramsci."

"Confirmed. Alert: an open call has been registered to First Contact Gramsci at stardate 2265.34 mark 19.6433, do you wish to accept?"

"Yes." Gramsci's federation badge chirped twice and Jaylah's voice from moments before replayed her comm request. "See?" he inquired and when she answered in the affirmative she heard her own voice echo back from the combadge.

"Speaking of food and drink," James T said, "it is getting late. Are you hungry, Jaylah?"

She considered it, "I could eat."

"Do you have any dietary restrictions?" the Vulcan security officer asked.

"Anything you can't eat" James T offered when Jaylah hesitated.

"No?" she offered. "I know federation food. My house has a blue food maker. I like the gray fluffy button."

"You got a protein resequencer working," asked Montgomery Scotty, "it must have long since run out of the substrate."

"I rotted roots. Ones I could not eat. The food maker could eat rot into food."

"Well in that case, allow me to showcase the food of my home. I know of a wonderful Italian restaurant."

Jaylah, markings neutral, mimicked a human shrug not having any particular feelings either way.

"If I may interject," Spock said, "while she may be unaware, during my studies of Doctor McCoy's scans, I found she has very little of the lactase enzyme and what she does has is geared for a different chiral configuration than human standard. I suggest caution or abstinence from milk based products."

"No cheese," Gramsci agreed, "got it."

Jaylah half listened as First Contact Gramsci gave directions to the taxi captain, most of her attention focused out of the window. As they had been talking the captain, not having any better plan, had drifted high out of the common traffic lanes. Yorktown had gradually spread out below her and what she saw literally took Jaylah's breath away. Some of the mountain top cities had building as large, maybe, but never so densely packed. Everywhere she saw was glass and metal and lights of a million hues and intensity. Large tracked transpiration machines snaked their way along the surface under a thing fog of gliding shuttles.

But what really caught her was the obviously apparent curvature of Yorktown's tight curve. Buildings stuck out in every direction describing a thousand pointed floating seed pod like those she had used to chase through her family's fields. Here and there were flashes of brilliant blue, the incredibly pure federation water and flickers of green from plants. Everything everywhere was clean and well maintained and vibrant. The horrors of Krall's attack were already almost completely cleared away. She couldn't really wrap her head around the necessary technological prowess. Her own distantly remembered home city was, well, a small plains city anyhow, but as busy as it could be there was always something that needed repairing. Some building that had corroded away from oxygen and chlorine rust. But this was, beautiful.

They began to pick up apparent speed diving down toward the surface of the space station and she shook her head dispelling the reverie and realizing she had tuned out the rest of the conversation around her. She gradually realized that the federations had been making polite small talk leaving her alone to hew own thoughts but now they were gently easing their way into making contact with the surface. There was the sigh of landing struts taking the weight and then James T tugged open the door and clambered onto the city street.

The street was bustling and noisy, filled with colors and blinking lights and dozens upon dozens of conversations within earshot. It was all much more than she had expected and Jaylah hesitated for a moment. Her usual situation awareness felt completely compromised.

It surprised her a little, the degree to which she felt unnerved. She had been to the heart of the nearest city a few times, and once the enormous bustling port city that capped the shbh iberik, the southwestern peninsula of her continent. It had been a wonderful vacation floating along in the semi private zeppelin while her dad worked up funding for his warp tunneling initiative. They had cruised along at what felt to be about the same speed James T's motor cycle had seemed to go on their way to rescue his crew from Krall, 125 km/h the readout had said, and it had taken five and a half days to sail through the water and iron pentacarbonyl vapor clouds while watching the swirling chlorine mists below hug the land.

She had loved the time she spent in the city. It was so busy and energized and interesting. People sang and beat drums for the throngs on almost ever street corner and the buildings were festooned with all manner of holographic displays some were even projected into the sky. There wasn't a trace of chlorine smell to the air, both because there were few plants or pools with bacteria to release the gas as a part of their self defense scheme and because there were giant rumbling scrubbers working under the streets. This left other smells free to linger in the air: cooking, the simple press of millions of Njerët e Barërush, the ozone and sulfur of industrial fabrication and a rich tang of ozone as the bounding surf churned apart the fragile iron pentacarbonyl turning the stones black and filling the air with the life giving molecule.

The air of Yorktown's streets was different. Breathing deeply she could feel the faint burn of too much oxygen and the ozone of massive electrical currents and a heady mix of the scent of many species – predominantly the musky salty smell of the humans. However, overwhelming them all was a delicious bend of sweet and spicy and herby rolling out of the doors of the shop they stood beside.

"This is Amore Mio," Gramsci enthused, waving at an interesting flowing interconnected script that Jaylah didn't know.

The Vulcan security officer stepped forward and opened the door glancing quickly over the customers and then stepped aside holding the door for the rest of the sextet. Jaylah stepped through and examined the interior. It was, thankfully, much less crowded, with the inhabitants spread out amongst a number of round wooden tables. The walls had fired mud reliefs depicting a roaring feline face. A wall decorated with three vertical bands of glittering stones in green white and black, presumably to slow down intruders she thought, had been erected behind a podium separating the eating space from the entrance.

Gramsci spoke to the human female behind the podium and after a short wait, while Montgomery Scotty checked in with her to see how she was doing and to answer a few questions she had thought of during the taxi ride, they were taken to one of the tables. She was handed a menu which was not dissimilar from ones she had looked on in Bariq or in her home and she opened it pleased to be in command of the situation again only to gaze at it in disappointment. The script was federation standard but she didn't know what well over 90 percent of the words meant. "I... Montgomery Scotty," she whispered gesturing at the incomprehensible pages in frustration.

He chuckled softly. "It is written in Italian, an old language from Earth. Is there anything in particular you want to eat?"

She shrugged, considering it, "lots?" she ventured. He laughed again and called her a good lassie and pointed to one of the offerings. She took it as a suggestion and when the waiter came to take their order she pointed to it as well.

"Tour dei regni?" the waiter confirmed and Jaylah nodded, a little uncertainly, that sounded vaguely like what the script had suggested.

Gramsci, who had subtly signaled the waiter to skip him during the ordering phase chimed in, "That is an excellent choice, I will have it as well. It means a trip through the kingdoms, the states that make up Italy, my home country on Earth. It is a variety of dishes showing off each one's local flavor. Only, my friend here has an issue with cheese so could we substitute out the lasagna?"

"Of course. May I suggest the baccala alla vesuviana? We stock the cod locally in one of the pressure pools."

"That sounds like a wonderful idea and may we get an order of antipasto and a table salad as well, please?" The waiter nodded, finished taking the last of their orders, and left.

"Is there a dish your home is particularly famous for?"

"Brys is hollow. Very few Babëreshë are there. So it is where much food is given life. Nothing that is not elsewhere, just, more. My eaylah um father's home had a small home for brys pulë. Small fliers for eating. Some, in the hollows, raise plants for eating."

The antipasto was impressive, slices of cured meat were familiar fare to Jaylah but she was impressed with the mound of slivered green spicy plants and dark green plants with seeds still in them. The salad, however, was too much. Her eyes widened and she stood up. Half remember manners from her childhood conflicting, leaving a meal jarring with accepting a gift that is too expensive. A rich family could barely afford to eat so much plant matter in a week and a working class one might not see as much in a year.

James T stood as well, head swiveling, hands tensing at his sides. "What is it, Jaylah?" He asked battle tense looking for the threat.

She was embarrassed but tried to forge ahead, to make them see reason. "It is too much. I cannot."

"The salad?" James T said a little blankly, you just said your people raised plants.

"Yes, some, in air proof machines. Many many more now than ago. But it still is killing. How many died to gather so much for one sitting?"

"It's okay, Lassie, naebody died, farming is safe enough now. Its mostly automated."

"Why is farming so dangerous?" Gramsci wanted to know.

Jaylah stared at them. They couldn't not know. Well, a lot was different here, maybe the didn't know because it didn't happen. She glanced around the table and saw a glass vessel holding a white crystal. Carefully, she shook a few grains onto the table and touching one with her index finger tasted it. Yep, that was ocean salt. She pointed at it, "the gas half..." she lead, hoping they would pick up on it.

"Chlorine, that is bound to the sodium chloride crystal." Spock said, picking up the thread.

Jaylah nodded figuring he was probably right. "When you break plants they breathe chlorine. More than one, two break. You breathe you die."

Gramsci nodded. "Truly, our plants have no such protection. There are some that defend themselves in other ways but none of these do. It is common throughout the federation to eat many plants. Some, like Sunak and, Spock, right?, eat only plants."

It was honestly a little hard to imagine but Jaylah filled the plate she had with plants and just managed to squash a satisfied hum when she bit into it. She examined the eating movement of the others; First Contact Gramsci in particular seemed to be using exaggerated gestures that were easy to copy. Fortunately, the basic pattern was familiar to Jaylah, one instrument to hold the meal and one to cut it into mouth sized portions; that they were metal and not wooden was only a passing concern. It was nice to have actual utensils again and not the splintered shards of hull plating she had kept sterilized in her home.

The conversation drifted, touching here and there on the foods from their homelands. James T talked about the endless corn fields of Iowa and Spock about the terraced carefully maintained farms in the desert world of Vulcan. Jaylah spoke of the wandering cat-carts of the migrant people snaking along ancient trails built along the hilltops bringing goods to regions far from zeppelin ports. James T retold the story of how they had all met on Altamid and escaped. Montgomery Scotty and Jaylah talked about music and, Jaylah, to her horror was talked into singing a snatchet of a Babëreshë song. It wasn't the same without the drums to fill out the beats and her voice was in no way comparable to her mother's but they still applauded just the same. James T surprised everyone by singing a slow sad sounding song in what they called Klingon and Gramsci hushed Montgomery Scotty when he began singing limericks which had all of the humans laughing.

The food was better than anything Jaylah could remember eating in years and while there was still a lot of edible plants they were interspersed with meat and a variety of soft wet things called pasta. They tasted a little like some of the cooked ground seed blends from back home and were very warm and filling. The humans were drinking a translucent black beverage they called wine and the Vulcan's were drinking a hot green drink called tea. She liked them both contrasting the cool and warm and the rich plant taste to both. The wine was a little more familiar, tasting a little like the fruit, many of which were safe to eat without treating after they had detached from their parent plant, of her home: sweet and tart.

The two Vulcan's remained impassive during the meal but the more the humans ate and drank the redder in the face and the louder and more prone to laughter they became. Jaylah herself was starting to feel energized; the first traces of fatigue she had felt when they first sat down slipping away. "What do you think of your time on Yorktown?" The Vulcan next to Spock asked, rescuing her when the humans descended into laughter again, although she hadn't understood the joke, hadn't understood that there had been a joke.

"It is impressive," she enthused, "all works together and there are so many. Including you master-..."

The Vulcan blinked, "are you inquiring after my name? It is Commander Sunak, I would have thought you would have heard it while in isolation. The Yorktown is one of the Federations larger starbases, there are 563,457 registered residents as of the morning account."

Jaylah sat back khutut flickering. She knew it was large, but that was an order of magnitude more people than lived in her local city, all living in space. Her people had a small colony on Nipi i Nderuar, the aqueous moon around the gas giant Vëllai i Madh but she wasn't sure there were even a thousand people there. The thought scared her a little. If the federations wanted to take over Bariq she wasn't sure what her people could do to stop them. She laughed lightly, she had gone from wondering if there were aliens in the galaxy to finding out that there were and they were nightmarishly strong at every turn. True, the federations had been kind to her so far, but at the same time they had killed thousands in Krall's fleet and she could still see the bruises on James T's smiling face. They weren't nearly as soft as they seemed.

The evening wound down, the light in Amore Mio dimmed and the dome of the sky was turned a dimmer purple allowing more of the light of the stars beyond to become apparent. The waiter had offered a final course of sweets, but Jaylah was already uncomfortably full, not wanting to have left food on her large collection of dishes. "It is getting late," James T finally decided and Gennaro Gramsci nodded.

"Tomorrow is going to be busy," he continued. "You have an early morning meeting with Doctor McCoy and a formal first contact meeting with admiral Paris in the evening. I have secured you a diplomatic suite in the hotel where the Enterprise's command staff is being housed. I have already given them Doctor McCoy's recommendations for the night time air mixture and put up a mild level 1 air hazard warning, but are there any other sleeping arrangements that you would like? What do your people generally sleep on?"

The floor, flashed through her mind after years of building up small piles of dead leaves and then burning them in her home when the insects became too bad. She thought back to the cocoons of her child hood, netting anchored to the walls that you could curl over yourself. She tried to describe them to Gramsci and he nodded. "We have something similar called a hammock that we can try for tonight? We can work on something more to your specifications tomorrow?"

She nodded, not really caring. Anything would be better than what she had been coping with, really. Gramsci lead them into the kitchen so they could thank the chef and after assuring the very round human that they had enjoyed his work, they left and piled into another waiting taxi shuttle. More evidence, evidently, of Gramsci's quick use of his PADD.

The flight to the hotel was much shorter than the one from the hospital and they never rose far from the streets. Jaylah watched the flickering colors of the building displays as they soared past, letting her thoughts drift back toward Bariq and her family and all the wounds that they had so casually discussed tonight. She had tried to skirt around the really deep memories but images of sitting with her mom in the morning washing bird eggs swam behind her eyes, arguments with Benhamen about who would go out and find the birds scattered in flocks over the planes at night and chase them back into their house. She rested her arm over her eyes using the pressure to hold back the tears. She saw Montgomery Scotty move closer to ask why she was so quiet but James T pulled him back and shook his head. Which meant...she hadn't been subtle enough, she cursed.

She perked up a little when she walked into the hotel lobby; both to keep up appearances and, well, because it was hard not to find the, what looked like, real fire in a recess in the wall and black fabric and gold leafed furniture soothing. The check in process when smoothly and the receptionist showed Jaylah how to insert the card they gave her to unlock doors. Her card would let her into the pool, the gym, the two restaurants, the media room and her room. Gennaro Gramsci made sure she understood how to find her room, the first three digits were for the floor, the letter was for one of each of the walls, and then the last two numbers when down in order from there.

James T and Montgomery Scotty both wrote down their room numbers on a piece of paper for her and they reminded her how to use the computer to call any of them, or she could just call for the lobby and they would connect to them for her. She could also order food from the lobby if she got hungry or thirsty later in the night. Security officer Sunak warned her that she was not allowed to leave the hotel unaccompanied and let her know that a security officer, probably not himself, would be there to escort her to see Doctor McCoy in the morning before bidding them all a good night.

Jaylah followed Gramsci and a porter up to her room. There was the faint buzzing of an electric wall, but Gramsci assured her it was only to keep the unique atmosphere in the room contained. He stepped in and then back out to demonstrate. Jaylah nodded a little uncertainly, but stepped through. She could feel the tingle of current but there was no resistance like there had been around Bones McCoy's bed. The room was very comfortably furnished. Silver and black leather seemed to be the theme with softly gray painted walls. The first room they walked into was a sitting room of sorts with an impressive view over the city along the back wall. To her right, upon entering, was a small closet and a half bath and on her left was a small kitchenette with counters and a food slot. The porter opened a couple of drawers showing her a long list of cards she could chose from to make the food synthesizer work.

The porter inquired after Jaylah's bags, but Gramsci informed him that all of her things were still in transit. He assured her that they would be able to retrieve most of her things from the Franklin tomorrow or the day after at the latest. Completing the tour showed that there were two additional rooms, one with a large shower and an even larger tub. Jaylah assured them that she knew how to operate a vertical sink, a shower as they called it, telling them about how she had repaired the shower system on her home using some of the empty storage crates as a basin and leaving them on top to warm in the sun and feed down, until she eventually managed to figure out how to power an actual heater pump system.

The bedroom however really made her smile. There was a raised floor bit like the one Bones McCoy had had her on only much larger but strung above it was what must have been a hammock. It was much smaller than the cocoons she was used to and made of thicker rope but it was still such a rush of just, pure home, that she couldn't stop the sound she made deep in her throat: part laugh, part sob, part she didn't really know. "Thank you," she said earnestly and First Contact Gramsci made an odd but formal gesture bowing at the waist and telling her how gratified he was at her reaction.

The porter and he bade her good night and left. She sighed and turned on the shower, smiling happily when she figured out how to turn the water as hot as it would go. Steam fogged through the room and she pulled herself up onto the sink counter breathing deeply, enjoying filling her lungs without any twinge of pain. She peeled off her armor and clothing and after finding a way to wedge her weapon into the ceiling where it would be within reach but wouldn't get soaked she stepped into the stream of water. There were a variety of bars and bottles of good smelling things on the wall and she experimented rubbing them on her skin and hair, watching them foam and sluice the dirt away. Soap. She...honestly could not remember the last time she had been able to use soap. She spent an hour wearing the bar away to nothing scrubbing at her self trying to recapture the feeling of being cleansed that she had really never been able to recapture since...well she didn't want to think about that, too long, anyway.

When she finally stepped out she stretched and it felt like every joint in her body popped, muscles that had been knotted for years finally able to loosen. She was free. Sort of. She was off of Altamid. Definitely. Krall was dead sucked into space. Manas was dead having surely fallen to his death. She felt like she could finally put some of her ghosts to bed.

She remembered to grab the tricorder from her clothing and headed for the bedroom. She wished she had some spice wood to burn for her family to send their spirits home but as she dragged all the sheets she could find into the hammock and wrapped herself into a warm wet cocoon she chose to honor them by thinking about every good moment that she could remember with them, crying into the pillow, feeling like the tears might finally take some of the ache away with them.


	4. Chapter 4

_AN Not mine. So, something is seriously wrong with me. I spent three days of research in my university's library trying to find an alternate system for an elevator (and no, an escalator wasn't interesting enough. I was playing around, unsuccessfully so far, with Archimedes' screws and bathyspheres) to justify *two* sentences of exposition. Welcome to part 1 of 3 of idiot author writes a 20,000 word chapter and realizes belatedly that he should probably split it up some._

* * *

The subtle hum of the atmospheric control system piping Bones McCoy's air-blend into her room and the lighter shimmer of the electric wall sang to Jaylah as her world slowly faded back into existence. She stirred and stretched, hands and feet sliding along the soft Federation fabric. For the second time in as many days, she woke up in a cocoon. Only this time, rather than confusion and the fog of blindness, she knew where she was. More, there was a faint reassuring glow trickling in through her eyelids. She rolled over onto her back twisting the reassuring darkness of her fabric cave tighter around her. It was horridly tactically unsound but she found that she just didn't care. She felt lighter than she had in years.

Slowly, she allowed her eyes to flutter open and gasped softly. Her world was coated in a soft diffuse cool ultraviolet glow. The light was steady and, relatively, bright, shining out a message of deep contentment. It reminded her of the last time she had crawled into her mother's cocoon with Eilah to escape the pounding roar and crash of a severe thunderstorm. She could almost feel her little sisters finger's curling against her own, as Eilah sought to drag her from the tight webbing of lace Jaylah had ensconced herself into, in order to accompany the little girl on the mad dash down the ladder into their mother's room. Eilah was almost completely wreathed in the night, black hair and dark eyes fading into the shadows save for the glow of her markings; in this case: the brightly illuminated markings of her khutut alwajh had been lit a bright neon ultraviolet with even brighter beads of alarm glowing so far along the spectrum they nearly threatened to tip into the x-rays, or at least so it seemed to her at the time, coursed up in ripples that traced out the contours of her cheekbones and forehead.

Both of their khutut aljism were deeply muted, hiding from the threatening weather, while they swept across the floor of their room. By the fluorescing reflected curls of light in her little sister's eyes Jaylah knew that her own facial markings were shining in alarm. She had tugged open the floor door and made sure she had a good grip on the ladder before helping Eilah down (it wouldn't have been the first time, or the tenth, for the two siblings to have gone crashing to the floor because the little girl hadn't paid enough attention to where she was putting her feet). Once down, her mother's cocoon had glowed invitingly as she held the web open for them.

Her mother's light wasn't, by any means, bright enough to see by; it would take several Njerët e Barërush, each concentrating on making light, to accomplish that (or else the glittering iridescent phosphorescent glow produced by a crowd of Babëreshë as khutut flickered and reflected off of skin and eyes and hair). Still, that glow was a beacon of safety to any child and the two sisters had made a straight line for it, half giggling and half squabbling as they struggled to clamber in first.

She remembered the three of them cuddling together in the darkness as her mother wrapped the many layers of lace back around them. She remembered her mother's tongue on her neck: soothing, cleansing away the patch of acetone sweat. She remembered her mother's voice softly singing while she and Eilah tapped out the rhythm against their ribs. But, above all, she remembered the steady, almost true blue light of her mother's glow reflecting off of the white silk of the netting and the dusty iridescence of their skin.

Gradually, the glimmers of fear on Eilah's face had stilled and then cooled, fading away into a soft barely visible ultraviolet sheen, while, at the same time, the lines, on her body had flickered into a soft contented glow. Jaylah's own khutut aljism had gradually bloomed into life as she snuggled in and began drifting toward sleep. The two girls, although vastly outshown by their mother, provided just enough light that Jaylah was able to see the curves and shadows of her mother's body: eyes closed in sleep, the swoop of her nose lit just the faintest most contented blue, mouth turned in a soft smile, her chest rising and falling as she breathed, carrying Eilah's pillowed face with her—carrying the three of them into slumber indifferent to the raging wind and lightning outside.

She could feel it now, the way her mother had felt: calm and at peace in her own little corner of the world. Her body responded, bathing her cocoon in a soft light. She knew it could not last, but luxuriated in the feeling while she could. It wasn't quite the same as it had been with her mother. For one thing, her light was naturally a hotter ultraviolet, she could never fully capture her mother's calm serenity, and for another, the deep grays of the federation sheets absorbed more light than they reflected, painting deep shadows over most of Jaylah's body.

Still, as she shifted around, running her fingers down along her skin in the dark, tracing the lines of her khutut aljism as they snaked from under her collar bone. One set of lines flared out along shoulders to her biceps, while the major branch ran down splitting around the swell of her milk glands before braiding back together and coursing down along her stomach. Stretching, she couldn't remember the last time her, typically much fainter, body lines had glowed so brightly. When her fingers pressed against the bioluminescent cells they flared momentarily, leaving a brightly glowing wake. Where the light came back dimmed she spent a minute vigorously rubbing the muscles underneath with the heel of her palm, working out the tissue and improving blood flow until her glow was nice and even.

She knew it was self indulgent pampering but, after several days of confronting nightmares and hurtling into the unknown, she felt that she had earned it. Her hands drifted down to where her lines were obscured by the scars on her thighs and lower stomach, the lingering marks that Krall's phaser had left her with and she sighed softly. Her aljism cooled and the constant faint note of deep blue crept back into her alwajh. She sighed and uncurled, loosening her shell of sheets. She poked her head out into the cool dimness of her room and glanced around for any intruders. She held her breath, listening intently, but, other than the faint sounds of machinery she had noted earlier, everything was silent. Utterly silent, she couldn't hear anything from the street below or the long thin room that she knew was just outside of her own.

It was more than a little odd. On the one hand, the silence was reassuring to her Altamidean sensibilities, but on the other hand, her visceral response was to find the solitude deeply unsettling. She knew what she would do in her house: play her music, but... well, this was still a Federation house. Why couldn't she do the same thing? Unthinkingly, she twisted in her hammock the same way she would unnet a cocoon and was promptly deposited on the soft, raised floor beneath. She giggled softly, khutut flaring in embarrassment and bounced to her feet soaring a meter into the air in the ridiculously low gravity. She grinned and bounded back onto the springy raised floor and, after bouncing up and down a few times experimentally, launched herself almost a full seven meters over the ground. This was amazing!

Some non trivial time later, after one particularly high bounce left her momentarily tangled up in the narrow Federation cocoon, resulting in her flipping over and banging the back of her head on the hard edge framing the raised floor, she remembered her goal of seeking out some music. It didn't take long for her to find one of Federation computer panels. After looking for a way to turn it on, she stroked it with a finger and grinned when it flared into life. It was mostly the same as the system on her house, only where that had eight menus this one had dozens. Almost all of the menus were labeled in Federation script and while she couldn't find exactly what she was looking for, she was able to rule out several plus the non-standard script offerings. It didn't take long to figure out the navigation system: the deformed pentagon with a small right side square interrupting the triangle portion would bring her back to the choices screen, the green forward button would bring up more choices within a menu and the black back button would take her back to choices within that same menu but not to the main menu screen.

It took a fair bit of playing around but she finally found the symbol she was looking for under a menu labeled "media." It was highly stylized, two dots and three lines. The lines boxed in one of the dots leaving the other adjacent to, but outside of, one of the box lines. She had spent months on her house puzzling over the meaning of this symbol. Finally, it had come to her. It must stand for a stylized stage, the dot in the box was the performer and the dot outside was the observer. From there, it was a matter of touching the "artist" button and the circle with the line in the lower right hand corner that brought up the letter input system. Unlike her house's input system, which only brought up two different scripts, this one brought up almost 20, but the Federation standard was on the far left. Seconds later, the voice boxes in her room were rumbling her song. She touched the stylized image of a magnetic speaker and used her thumb to increase the line until the image showed as many concussive blasts as possible.

She danced while these Beastie Boys yelled about sabotage and their inability to stand it—feet skipping lightly with the beat, barely contacting with the floor, she skimmed along with the trivial gravity, her breaths coming more quickly as sweat popped out on her neck and extremities. There was no real pattern to her movements save, spin! Her mother had taken her to a few lessons at the temple but Benhamen had been the only real dancer of the trio.

As the shapes in the world around her became increasingly indistinct, the colors became more apparent. The Federations appeared to enjoy cold tones: all greens, blues and violets with barely enough of the higher colors to tint anything truly white. It left the floating tail of her hair and her skin curiously muted, lacking their normal iridescence and phosphorescent pop. Even the gray of the walls had a curious aquamarine hue, the color of the water in the educational holograms of the circulating superstorms roaring over the pure water seas, far from the churning shores.

The deep rich flavor of the carbon monoxide in the air filled her nose as deliciously as the finest steak would her mouth, powering her muscles long after the burn of anoxia filled her limbs, but, eventually, despite the friendly atmosphere and gravity she settled to her knees breathing hard. She laughed, delighted little bubbles of light coursing up her khutut. She took a long moment to recover, the thrumming pulse of her arteries flushing the anaerobically produced acid from her muscles, as a new song with a voice telling her to come with it now so it could take her down came on.

Eventually, she pushed herself to her feet and headed into the washing room to use the vertical—no the "shower". She flipped the water on and, opening her mouth, twisted the water to cold for as long as she could stand it, rapidly drinking her fill, before blanching a little when she belatedly realized she had never asked if the water was potable. Shrugging, she flipped the water to hot and stood back as the steam filled the air. Experimentally, she walked around the room seeing what else it held. A small door hid more towels for the shower and some assorted odds and ends and another concealed the waste elimination system which, thankfully, was functionally the same as the system her own people employed.

The small basins were topped by a mechanism that looked a lot like the spigot on the big cooking-water barrels that her father had always complained about hoisting into place outside the kitchen wall. Water on Bariq wasn't precisely rare, but clean water was. You could drink what came out of the ground or the rivers, in some of the most remote corners some Babëreshë still did, or coped by drinking the blood of their food. However, untreated water was hardly palatable, or particularly good for you, with it high concentration of dissolved metals. When, long ago, Babëreshë had rarely lived past their first year it hadn't been much of a problem, but now that some were actually reaching their third orbit, the risk of heavy metal toxicity was too high. So, she couldn't help the little flare of pleasure in her khutut when she ran her hand under the spout and was delighted to feel cool water immediately pour out over her fingers. She felt vindicated. She had been certain that similar set ups in her house had to have been for providing water but she had never been able to make them work.

Her favorite discovery, however, was the hot-tub. The mechanism was exactly the same as the … shower, only it was barely at knee height. At first, Jaylah assumed it was for washing clothing but the basin seemed unreasonably large. While the steam billowed out over the glass wall that constrained the shower water, she flicked on the tub spigot and stared, her Khutut flaring in shock. She had thought the water the shower ran through was extravagant but water literally flooded into the basin gushing forth from the spigot. There was a snap and a hum as a tiny electric wall prevented the water from flowing back out.

Within the playing of one new song and the next, the tub was half way full. She padded back to the shower and shut it off, grabbing one of the soap bars and a cloth. She understood the point of the basin in an intuitive flash, an artificial lake of seemingly pure water to wash yourself in. By the time she got back, the water had automatically shut itself off, thin curls of steam wisping off of the surface. Gingerly, she reached in and rubbed her fingers on the bottom to see how slippery it was, but they stuck easily enough. She stepped into the water, khutut aljism flaring in contentment as the warm water coated her feet and calves.

Slowly, she worked herself into the basin, careful to make sure that her head came no where near the surface. She startled when she was about three quarters lying down, small holes in the sides of the tub pressed accelerated jets of warm water against her skin. She actually moaned in pleasure, khutut alwajh flickering in embarrassment while her eyes scanned to make sure she was truly alone. Spirits, these Federation know how to live she thought. She giggled when the fast currents on her ribs made the tops of her bodily markings flare involuntarily, small flecks in the large basin reflecting back the hot white light.

A space that she had taken for part of the small ceramic squares that decorated the walls of the bathing room blanked out and became an interface screen with two columns of text. One column had a definite pattern: there was a random word or two of text in the federation script followed by the word massage. She didn't know what a "massage" was exactly but she thought it might be something along the lines of pattern; at least, when she touched the words the image became an animation of a particular pattern of the water accelerators engaging and if she held it down the nozzles would shoot water at her in that particular pattern. There was no discernible organization to the other list, but when she pressed down on the one the script labeled "lavender" a single jet engaged and then the scent of flowers, albeit much sweeter ones than those that grew on her home, filled the air.

She lost track of time as she played with the jets and the scents but eventually she must have fallen asleep. At least, a repeated chime interrupted a vague dream of being swept along in a river that cut through a forest growing deep among the stars. Where the chimes disturbed her dream, however, Montgomery Scotty's voice shattered in entirely. She yelped, jerking up right and cursing as her forehead cracked against the water spigot; hands flying to cover herself while her painfully flaring khutut was reflected back at her from the wet tiles.

"Jaylah, are you awake, lass?" came Montgomery Scotty's voice again, mercifully from one of the voice boxes. She still carefully examined the room to make sure her engineer had not entered while she was asleep but, as far as she could tell, she was still alone.

"I am in the washing water, Montgomery Scotty."

"Oh. Um... okay. Are you okay?"

"Yes!" She insisted, her voice climbing an octave, khutut mimicking the birth of a new star. "Do not enter, Montgomery Scotty."

"Right... Only, can you work on getting ready? Doctor McCoy is getting anxious. He set you up with a new appointment for noon. It's oh nine thirty now."

Her khutut dimmed and cooled, wavering in abashed agreement even though he couldn't see her... at least, she hoped he couldn't see her. "You can come into the middle room." She offered.

"Uh, actually, lass, I can't. I don't have a keycard."

She tapped her forehead to admonish herself for foolishness, as she hurriedly wiped the water off with one of the extra towels. She had known that. After getting dressed, twice, the second time with Bones McCoy's twine-corder securely in place, and snatching her weapon from where she had wedged it into a corner, she wrenched the door open smiling broadly. "Good morning, Montgomery Scotty." She chirped, pleased that she remembered the correct greeting from the videos of the Franklin mates.

Surprisingly, Montgomery Scotty jumped, stepping back while his eyes snapped to her teeth. Her smile faltered a little but before she could really begin to worry the engineer recovered, offering back his own smile. "Good morning, Lassie. You seem chipper this morning."

"What is chip per?"

"Energetic. In a good mood. Happy."

Jaylah considered it. "Yes," she agreed, acknowledging his assessment. "But I am in sorry too. For missing Bones McCoy's morning check up."

Montgomery Scotty waved his hand back and forth. "It's okay. Turns out that Doctor McCoy was asked to speak at the captain's hearing this morning anyhow. Um, that's where the captain's boss asks him questions about our last mission... you know, to Altamid." He placed his hand on her shoulder again and they began walking down the long narrow room. "We... all lost a lot there. There were one thousand one hundred of us, now there are eighty one."

Jaylah's khutut glowed a somber blue echoing Montgomery Scotty's grief and she placed her own hand on his shoulder. It was a little awkward walking side by side like that but he didn't indicate that he wanted her to stop. "I am sad with you, Montgomery Scotty."

The human glanced away and nodded. "Yeah, so. Starfleet, they are going to want to know why so many were lost. Could it have been prevented, what can they do to keep it from happening in the future. That kind of thing."

"How can it be happening again? Krall's fleet burned."

"And no one else can build something similar? Now that the weakness has been found?"

Jaylah glanced at the ground in acknowledgment, her small fang worrying her lip as she considered Montgomery Scotty's response. It was... sound tactical reasoning. Which surprised her, a little, although she didn't know why exactly. James T had come up with a good plan. It was just, these people seemed so strong and so carefree. What need did they have of such careful thoughts?

"Anyhow," he said, "I didn't mean to bring you down. It's nothing for you to trouble yourself over, lass."

Jaylah, khutut dimming to almost nothing in shame turned her face away, nodding. She knew that wasn't entirely true. She and her family had played their part in the Federation's troubles. But she just...couldn't tell them yet. She was too happy to be with people who wanted her to be around to be ready to contemplate returning to the darkness of isolation.

"Really, Lassie. It'll be alright," the engineer said turning and stepping into a very small room. "Captain Kirk has been in more trouble than this before. And it isn't even his fault this time. Get him to tell you about Kobayashi Maru sometime."

"I will, Montgomery Scotty." She acknowledged, wondering if this was yet another of James T's frequently encountered 'omnicidal maniacs'. "I will be helping." She assured him when the silence stretched. "When James T is in trouble." She stepped into the small room after him and the door slid shut automatically. She vaguely remembered a similar space last night with First Contact Gramsci and the Porter but her head had been buzzing with too much new information to pay adequate attention.

The human tapped his fingers together, scuffing his feet on the floor. She carefully mimicked his actions, trying to figure out what was going on, when he spoke up, his face a little flushed and his voice a half octave higher than usual. "Right, anyhow. I'm sorry I interrupted your bath. I just thought it would be nice to make sure you were up and prepared for the appointment. And knew about the time change. And Nurse Koh had contacted Doctor McCoy and said that you were separated from the tricorder for a long time. And I thought, maybe, you might like to come out and get something to eat with me first?"

Jaylah stared at him, a little amazed that he could say all of those words without breathing. A lot of it had gone over her head. They were all words she knew... but they had come so fast. She worried her lip, trying to parse all of that without looking like an idiot but eventually khutut flickering in embarrassment she had to shrug. "What?"

Montgomery Scotty laughed at her and she scowled a little but he repeated the last part in a more measured pace. "Would you like to get something to eat?"

Oh. She thought about it. "I breathed a lot this morning. But it might be good to eat something if Bones McCoy wants me to be doing labor later."

"Labor?"

"He said that appointment was to be physical."

The human's face went dark briefly and then he smiled. "No. Well... not exactly anyhow. He's probably going to want to draw a little blood and do a few more in depth scans. I don't know exactly what a first xenoexam entails, he might want to gauge your physical attributes," he paused his face gradually going a dusky gray with points of black on his cheek bones and ears before fading to an atypical pale, "um, I mean, how strong you are, how fast you can run, your tolerance to heat and cold," he paused at her indrawn breath, "um, slowly. He's not going to try and burn you or anything, he just wants to know how your body acts normally so if it starts acting differently we can tell that you are sick. And Gramsci is probably going to want to enter you into the universal translator."

She watched as Montgomery Scotty pushed a button on the wall, illuminating a small light above. Almost immediately afterword, the small room lurched and began to descend. Jaylah frowned as the silence stretched between them, trying to figure out why her engineer seemed strange this morning. To be fair, he was apparently worried about James T, and now so was she, and that was a plausible explanation, but she wished she knew for certain. Still, in the moments when she was distracted by the opening of the lifting room Montgomery Scotty had readopted his smile and she was willing enough to let the matter drop. "It smells nicely in here" she offered to get him to start talking again.

He breathed in deeply. "It does. Grandmother's cooking" he grinned seeming pleased about this. He slid his key-card into the reader, opening the door and leading her inside. He mused, "You know, I do have to thank you. Our accommodations... where we stay we when we aren't on a star ship... aren't usually half this nice."

"Oh. Why not? What are less nice stays like?"

"Well... they generally include cafeterias and generally don't include tubs"

"Oh. I like the accelerated water pulses."

He blinked thinking about that for a moment and then grinned, "aye, and they definitely don't include hot tubs. I'm jealous."

"You could be in it while I get physical with Bones McCoy."

He waved his hand in the air again and turned his attention to a girl with vibrant blue skin and what appeared to be an extra set of sensory organs attached at her hair line standing behind the podium. Jaylah noted she had particularly wide eyes and seemed to be hiding her mouth with her hands. "Good morning" she said, tripping over the first syllable "Welcome to the Ritz-Carlton Café at The End of the Universe. Would you care for a menu or would you like to try our award winning brunch buffet?"

Jaylah twisted back to look at Montgomery Scotty Khutut flickering uncertainly but he just seemed to watch her. "Buffet-" she started, intending to ask what it was but the podium girl chirped, "Certainly. If you will follow me please."

The blue skinned podium girl lead them through the atrium defense point into a first larger eating room and then through what appeared to be real gold or at least gold covered sliding doors into a second smaller eating space. Jaylah approved of the design. The rooms flowed into eachother nicely without the need of the silly wasteful narrow rooms the Federations seemed to enjoy. That small pleasure, however, was immediately dwarfed by what she found in the second smaller, if longer, eating room.

On one side were many small tables that could hold between two to eight Babëreshë or Federations she supposed, with space to place your food. On the other side seven very large tables lining the walls with Federations apparently cooking food to place out on the large platters that surrounded them. People were milling around, collecting the food from the larger platters and bringing it back to the small table side. But what really thrilled her was the wonderful pure white light leaking out from the ceiling lamps around the cookers and over the food platters. The cold tones of the Federation design hadn't bothered her exactly but her eyes just... seemed to relax now that some of the higher energy frequencies warmed up the space. It made it all seem so much more cheerful and less somber.

Even the Federations and other aliens seemed more cheerful under the complete glow. Their teeth popped and their eyes glowed. She turned to ask Montgomery Scotty why all the rooms weren't like this but the words got shunted to the side as she looked at him. "Oh. You do have Khutut Alwajh too. Why are you never using them?"

"I have what now?"

"Khutut" she said, tracing her fingers along the markings over her cheeks making them flair conspicuously.

He stared at her. "I. Like your black stripes? No I haven't."

She stared back at him. Why on Bariq would he lie about something so silly. They were right there. Wait, her Khutut, black? She shivered a little at the deeply unlucky statement; not that she really believed in luck, but still, only the dead went black. "No, they aren't black" she insisted aware that they were burning hot and bright with agitation.

"What color are they then," he asked, sounding completely mystified.

"Um." She tried to think it out. There were a couple of texts with diagrams on her house that had talked about the frequencies of light but the Federations made odd distinctions. They only had two colors after violet near and far ultraviolet and had lots of colors for hot surface light: yellow, orange, red, near infrared and far infrared. It all seemed needlessly arcane. Thinking it through she came up with "cool, far ultraviolet."

"I... have ultraviolet stripes?" her engineer said, touching his face no where near one of his stripes.

"I do not understand this game. I do. You do not. You are brown striped. Here." She touched the striped that extended from just past the corner of his mouth out to near where his ear met and back over his eyebrow circling the point in the middle of his forehead where the face lines and the head lines met and swirled. She drew her finger back khutut flickering in embarrassment while Montgomery Scotty grew darker, which made his markings stand out a little better. Perhaps that was why they changed skin tone rather than marking color. But...that sounded exhausting. She knew how much her khutut could itch when they were working overtime. Imagining her whole face feeling like that sounded... unpleasant. "Can you really not light them at all?"

"Lassie. I cannae even see them. I honestly don't know what you are talking about. You... can see ultraviolet light?"

"Of course?"

"Huh. I think you might be the first species we have encountered who can. Sapient anyhow. Some birds on Earth can. We have ultraviolet running lamps to startle them out of the way to prevent collisions"

The podium girl with big eyes, managed, impressively, to make her eyes even bigger. She made a high pitched squeal in her throat and bounced up and down. Jaylah stepped back, putting herself between the threatening display and Montgomery Scotty. "You're a new species?" she asked, her voice unpleasantly high pitched.

"I...no?"

"To the Federation?"

"Oh. Yes?"

Jaylah winced as the girls voice became even shriller. She was painfully aware that the entire eating space had gone silent and her hand tightened around the weapon she had been casually leaning on. "That is so cool!" The blue skinned girl enthused, sensory organs standing rigidly up. "I was so excited to get to meet aliens when my momma was stationed on Yorktown. All we have back home are a bunch of Vulcans and Humans and Andorians of course."

Jaylah looked at Montgomery Scotty hoping for some kind of clue as to the appropriate reply but before he could respond a cool if friendly voice spoke up, "Is there a problem here?"

Turning, Jaylah just saw the closing of a sliding door of a lifting room. Of more immediate interest was the new species striding toward them. The alien had muddy gray scales that just barely caught the light with a faint iridescent sheen. The scales ran up in thickened rows along the side of his neck and over his face outlining his eye sockets and forehead before they disappeared under his thick black hair. "Is there a problem here?" The masculine alien asked, his mouth quirked into a smile and eyebrows raised.

"No, sir, mister Morahs, sir" the podium girl squeaked, face darkening from a bright cerulean to a deep azure.

The scaled alien placed his hand on the girl's shoulder, silencing her, and turned his attention to Jaylah. "Please forgive Tarah, she is very young, as Andorians consider such things." His hands flexed gently pushing the nervous girl back toward her station. "You must, of course, be Jaylah. I was, naturally, informed of your arrival. It's essential, you see, to keep up with the arrival of new notables, given my position." He paused, seeming, to Jaylah, to be expecting some kind of a response but when none was evidently forthcoming he continued on, seeming undeterred. "My name is Morahs Iloja. I dabble in many things, but here I work in customer relations. Of course, what is important to you is that I have some experience being more or less singular within Starfleet's territory. If you should ever need to speak..."

Jaylah drew a little closer to Montgomery Scotty, khutut aljism dimming in caution. It wasn't that this Dabbler Morah Iloja seemed threatening, exactly. On the contrary, he seemed very friendly but, well, she had come to her Engineer and to James T, having him come up to her seemed... different, although she couldn't really understand why.

For his part the scaled alien seemed to notice Jaylah's reticence and recovered quickly. "It can be a lot to take in, believe me, I know. I only meant to formally welcome you, if more discreetly, certainly no less enthusiastically than Tarah. Have no fear, I have read you have a weakness to dairy. I will make sure to pass it along. I am certain we will run into each other again. Enjoy your meal."

The leathery alien slipped away to talk to the people behind the large food tables and Jaylah and her engineer slid into one of the smaller eating tables, the latter teasingly calling her a "celebrity," although she was wise enough not to pursue what that word meant. A quiet waiter slipped into place and at Montgomery Scotty's suggestion she ordered a smoothie, a ground up concoction that blended fruit and plant bits. By the time her engineer had returned with his second tray of food she had worked through the first third of the two page list of drinks and the waiters smile had taken on a strangely rigid cast.

The pair talked about the various species that made up the United Federation of Planets, particularly the four founding members: the Humans, Vulcans, Andorians (which the podium girl had apparently been) and Tellarites as well as some of the new member species that had petitioned to join: Caitlans, Arcadians, Ariolo, Bzzit Khaht and Kaheeta among others. When Jaylah pointed out that none of the species described matched the leathery appearance of Dabbler Morah Iloja, the green eyed alien shrugged. "I'm hardly an expert, lass. Any school boy in Elgin could have told you as much. But there are dozens of species in the Federation and dozens more petitioning to get in. More, you've got to figure its the same in the other major governments."

Jaylah worried her lip with her canine trying to commit all these facts to memory but they tended to blend together. It was easier to keep the species she had met straight, a little at least, and those that her engineer had built up a number of personal experiences with but not by that much. She revolved to find a text file on her room's computer panel on the various local species. "Other governments?"

"Oh aye. The Federation is not alone out here. There are the Romulans, the Klingon, the Gorn..." he trailed off shrugging. "Its a big galaxy, Lassie, and teeming."

"I see." She sat back khutut dimming in chagrin, it had been a little flattering the attention she had been paid by Gramsci and podium girl and the dabbler, awkward and unsettling sure, but a little flattering. She felt a little like a fraud for not letting them know that she wasn't really anything special. Her people did not command a place in the galaxy.

Montgomery Scotty watched her, pushing around the last of his second pile of the gray fluffy federation food. "Are you sure you donae want something solid to eat, lass"

Jaylah watched as his fork swirled her stomach already uncomfortably full of sloshing liquid becoming slightly queasy as her body tensed up. She tried to analyze the swirling rise of emotions flickering along her khutut: on the one hand her feeling of wellbeing and now fullness was carried over from this morning, making her feel content and sleepy, but on the other hand she felt guilty for feeling so well. These people were being so kind to her but she wasn't who they thought she was. She wasn't some great representative of the Njerët e Barërush like Montgomery Scotty and James T were for the Federation, running around the galaxy saving aliens in distress. She was just...small and lost and guilty of some many unforgivable failures.

"I don't. Montgomery Scotty..." She pushed away her final smoothie, a thin layer of deep blue coating the bottom, her stomach tightening in anxiety. She wanted to tell him that her people weren't a galactic power. They hadn't even unified their planet's government yet, although there hadn't been overt conflict for several decades. But, even if she did trust her engineer, what if one of these other power's overheard her. What if the MACO's did. Shans Dielli was so vulnerable. She drew in a deep breath, wincing a little at the burn of too much oxygen. "I don't understand why everyone is so wanting to be meeting. I am not that good for meeting." She shifted as the black shirted human stared at her.

Montgomery Scotty smiled. "Nae, lass. I have been on the Franklin. I don't know many members of any species who could have put that wreck back together. And to work on a ship based around alien designs?" His voice trailed off, and he stood, offering his hand to help her up, "I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't be interested in meeting you. Speaking of, I'm sure doctor McCoy and Lieutenant Gramsci are as eager to get to know you better as I am.

She put her hand in his and tugged expecting the visibly more massive alien to help her to her feet but instead the human squawked slightly and landed in her lap. His face darkened, his cheeks and ears fading nearly to black while Jaylah Khutut glowed bright enough that she could almost make out their reflected glow on her engineer's face. She straightened, lifting the human with her easily against the light restraint of the local magic gravity.

"Aye, well. I guess the doctor won't yell at me for bringing you in weak with hunger."

"I am not hungered, Montgomery Scotty. I breathed much this morning. But I really like smoothies. Can we be having more of those again?"

The engineer chuckled. "I imagine that can be arranged. But I know one or two better things to do with yon grass shakes other than drink them straight."

"What would that be?"

"That, Lassie, you will find out when I bring you to the pinnacle of Earth culture. A pub. I cannae tell you all about it now. There is an initiation ritual first."

Jaylah nodded slowly, khutut aljism dimming slightly in apprehension, she knew better than to wade into someone else's sacred rights. She vaguely remembered Eilah sitting in her lap learning to read; her finger's trailing along the script as she read her favorite story about the madhakim Huetethew këmbësor alealam, the great student who proved the world was round by walking through twenty seven kingdoms, learning their ways by humbly submitting himself to their rituals. The book was supposed to be about honoring the value of diversified thinking. Still, not all of those encounters had gone... entirely well.

They used another of the checkered taxis to return to the hospital. It seemed strange to her to centralize all of your city's health care in one location. What if something happened to that one building? It would be crippling. And it just seemed... cold. The lighting was back to the dull blue federation scheme which was a shame, one of her favorite things about living among the rocks of her home were the sparks of fluorescence when the cool Altamidian sun was shining particularly directly. The polished walls of the first room here would have really shone under the right conditions.

Her engineer had been quiet on their flight. When she had asked him about it he had smiled and said he was just wondering how the captain was getting on and then proceeded to get quieter still. She watched him for a long moment and then placed her hand on his shoulder. She couldn't help feeling a little silly but he seemed to appreciate the gesture. Still, it was a quiet pair that Montgomery Scotty lead to the large central desk to check Jaylah in for her physical.

The desk girl spoke softly to her screen before glancing up. "I am sorry. Doctor McCoy isn't here just yet, but I have paged his combadge. In the meantime, it looks like commander Gramsci has an open schedule for you in the universal translator suite if you would like to meet him there?"

Montgomery Scotty nodded in the affirmative and the desk girl waved them toward a bank of decorated arches set into the wall. Jaylah followed curiously. Her friend seemed to be walking toward this art exhibit presumably to wait at until Lieutenant Gramsci met them so she studied it more closely. There were fifteen arches with the third from the left glowing a soft blue white with a few of the higher energy frequencies leaking through. The arches seemed to be entirely stone with a round metallic plate on the floor. Lights and electronics flickering were also built into the ceiling. They were nicely symmetrical and smooth but otherwise a little dull. Maybe if it were hung with some more lights or some bells with a little paint to emphasize the details it would work better.

Without pausing, Montgomery Scotty stepped under the arch and immediately began shimmering away into energy. The effect looked vaguely familiar but she couldn't place it. Fearing an attack, she yelled, lurching forward. Priming her muazza albal'zima, she fired a compressed bolt of plasma at the ceiling electronics trying to interrupt the disintegration effect. She snapped her arm out, grabbing her engineer and trying to drag him into safety.

A trilling shimmering sound reverberated through her world as motes of energy temporarily obscured her vision. When her sight returned, she was again lying on one of the soft raised sections of floor with James T and Bones McCoy standing over her. She caught First Contact Gramsci bouncing about in the background trying to get a look at her, his hair in disarray and his eye fur pinched together.


	5. Chapter 5

AN Somebody else's. Welcome to part 2 of idiot author writes a 20k chapter and realizes he should probably break it up.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," James T said with a small smile.

"You know, Chickadee, when I set you up with an appointment today, it wasn't so you could go back on my operating table." Bones McCoy said, placing his hands on his hips, his words delivered in a flat tone.

Jaylah tried to piece the last moments together and drew a blank. "Where is Montgomery Scotty?"

"He's fine." James T said soothingly. "He's recovering in a private room."

"Recovering? Of what injury?" She sat up, priorities clicking into place. "We were attacked. In the hospital rock room. In the arch art. One of Krall's demaking weapons."

"Attacked? When?" Gramsci's voice sounded hard, but his eye fur were drawn up, not down, like Montgomery Scotty's did when he was annoyed.

"The stone room. The first room of entering."

"The atrium? Where you fired into the transporter alcove? Some one was attacking you?"

Jaylah shrugged about the "atrium" and "alcove" but she nodded her head in the Federation mode about the attack.

"Computer," First Contact Gramsci ordered, "play hospital charlie atrium transporter alcove time stamp 2265.35 mark 10.0583" A computer panel on the wall went momentarily blank before displaying an image of Montgomery Scotty stepping onto the circular pad in the art display immediately beginning to fade. "Rewind and rotate." The little Jaylah and engineer walked backwards until they were a few meters from the display and then the vantage point rotated around them, displaying the entire room. There were the table girls and one person in a teal vest and pants clearly not looking at them. Beyond that, there was no one else. James T even asked the computer to scan for hidden life signs but no new contacts were found.

"But, you can see." Jaylah said, pointing to the disintegration field around her engineer. "You see Montgomery Scotty unmaking. We were attacked."

"There was just no one around the transporter, Jaylah," the Doctor Bones McCoy said softly.

Wait. Transporter. With dawning horror creeping into her Khutut sending them toward the far ultraviolet she whispered, "Transporter. Like my house's people moving room."

James T nodded.

"So I..." she trailed off.

"Scattered your particles over several thousand square meters, nearly killing the both of you." Bones McCoy supplied helpfully.

Jaylah dropped her staff from nerveless fingers. Spirits take her, they had warned her. But, of course, she had known better. Known to protect her soft silly engineer, instead she had nearly killed him. It wasn't even like she hadn't seen a Federation transporter working before, she berated herself; she had seen James T shimmering before Krall's base had dissolved into her house. She had acted without thinking. She hadn't even considered breaking her word. She hadn't remembered giving it at all. She just... saw Montgomery Scotty being "attacked" and reacted.

Her khutut alwajh flashed deep blue in mute acknowledgment when James T said that he had to confiscate her weapon. There were conditions and stipulations placed on getting it back but she wasn't listening. She knew the next step was the Macos. She knew from her house that the Federations and the Macos didn't get along. Didn't agree. But that they would come all the same. She wasn't even entirely certain that they would be wrong to come for her. How sick was she? To say one thing and then do another? It was unthinkable.

But, she had seen it on her house. How the first officer argued against turning the Romulan over to the Macos how they had over ruled him with a millitree jurs diction. The video had just cut off. It took months for her to find the rest. Stuck on one of the memory crystals with numerous blocks of text she couldn't understand. But she had understood the video.

She broke, panicking, leaping off the table, tucking her feet in so she could soar over Bones McCoy's head. She landed in a crouch, springing herself for to slam her body, shoulder first, into the line between the sliding doors and then promptly bounced back. She bit back a yelp as the joint swelled, immobilizing the compressed bone and, rolling to her feet, jumped straight up against the weak force of gravity. Her body flew higher than she anticipated, arm flung up protectively it encountered a centimeter of soft foam and then hard metal beyond. Her momentum carried her forward, cracking her head painfully against her forearm. She sprawled against the floor breathing hard to try to gather herself but, before she could make another attempt, James T's boot came down against her chest. Unable to muster the energy to attempt to sit up against his added weight she writhed futilely until she felt a cool hiss against her neck. Abruptly, all her muscles went lax leaving her gasping for air.

"What the hell was that?" James T hissed, in a clearly threatening voice.

"Please. I will keep going."

"Not damn likely. Now. Explain."

"The Macos!" Jaylah insisted, trying to will her khutut to display the urgency of the situation but they felt completely numb—as reluctant to respond as the rest of her body.

"The who? Look. There is no where to go." James T brought his fingers up to the bridge of his nose and squeezed.

Jaylah changed tactics faster than she could keep up with herself. Her mind was screaming at her but her body and mouth were on autopilot. She reached up caressing the inside of James T's leg, her body going entirely blank while she placed a smile on her face. "Please," she plead in a soft whisper.

Confusingly, a look of unmistakable panic crossed James T's face lips pulling back eyes widening eye fur rising. He took a large step backwards raising his hands; looking up, Jaylah saw Bones McCoy's own eye fur was also located in the middle of his forehead. First Contact Gramsci knelt near her but definitely out of touching range. "What is it that you are so afraid of?"

"The Macos" Jaylah insisted. "I know my problem is bad."

Gramsci thought that over. "You are probably in some trouble, yes. But Starfleet isn't going to hurt you, Jaylah. Has anyone shown any interest in hurting you so far?"

Well, no. So far, everyone had been varying degrees between aloof and affable but no one had been really hostile. She shook her head, khutut double flickering in abject disagreement. "I know. Not Starfleet. The milli-trees. The Macos. Please, James T." She worried her fang into her lip, hating the begging tone in her voice, hating surrendering that much power but she never wanted to be tortured again.

Everyone was staring at her. They were all giving her lots of space, which would have meant more if she could freely move and, moreover, no one was moving toward the door to let her out. James T very slowly sat down cross legged on the floor. He picked up her weapon and, in the same moment when she flinched, tossed it, letting it roll over to the wall. Jaylah heard a hissing sound, then Bones McCoy joined him with one of those spray things in his lap. "The only MACOs I can think of." James T said slowly and evenly, "were the marines on the old proto-starfleet Terran craft. You must have learned about them on the Franklin but I am not sure if we are talking about the same MACOs or is "maco" a word in your language?"

Jaylah stared at him. She had no idea what a marine was but they were soldiers in the video on her house. "The ones who spoke jurs milli-tree."

That was met with another round of silence. "But... from the Franklin? Yes or no?"

Jaylah flickered her khutut, nodding her head in afterthought.

"Right. I'm... not sure why you would be so afraid of them. But. Look, they're gone. They no longer exist. The Vulcan's insisted no extralegal, um, outside the chain of command, free to act on their own, organizations could exist outside of Starfleet within Federation space." He, carefully, didn't add anything about all of the extralegal organizations that apparently could exist within Starfleet. "The MACOs were disbanded, one hundred and four years ago. I promise. No one is coming. And anyone who does will have to go through me."

"But... you said I could have killed Montgomery Scotty."

"Yeah, don't do that again." James T looked at her seriously for a long moment, then the muscles in his face relaxed a little. He crept a little closer. "What was the first thing you asked about when you came around... woke up again."

Jaylah paused, her fangs pressed hard into her lips—the one on the left bringing up a bead of blood. She couldn't remember. Her mind was lost in an emotional whirlpool, dread, guilt, relief, suspicion, and remorse each chasing another into the depths. She rested her hands on her face hiding her wildly flailing khutut, slowly pulling herself into a small ball. She drew in a shuddering breath which, in turn, forced her to cough; her lungs aching with the oxygen burn. James T settled closer to her while First Contact Gramsci and Bones McCoy slowly moved to their feet. She heard the snap of the door sliding open and the hiss of, she thought, a hypospray, but none of it was really registering.

James T reached out slowly but firmly touching her face. She blinked in startlement and would have stiffened if she could have. Instead, inexorably, James T pulled her head up until his pure blue eyes stared into her multihued golden and black eyes. "The first thing you asked about was Scotty, and your first real action was to inform me of an attack on him. That was the right thing to do. The fact that you were wrong doesn't make your intention wrong. Just uninformed. You weren't trying to be a killer, you are just untaught. Thank you for trying to save my crew member and shame on you for breaking your promise to," here his voice became a little louder and he separated the words out strangely "actually go and check with somebody to see if there was really any danger."

She tried to communicate her understanding, as well as the depth of her gratitude, that he didn't seem to be turning his back on her, but the words collapsed into a sob which, in turn, set her off into a sneezing fit. She felt completely emotionally exhausted. It felt like her khutut were sliding around on ice, unable to find any purchase as they careered from happiness to terror to contentment to misery. None of the rules by which she had lived her life on Altamid seemed to apply here and the consequences for each infraction appeared to range from the deeply embarrassing to the potentially lethal.

"All right, Chickadee," Bones McCoy said "It sounds like its past time for your next dose." She felt him brush her disheveled hair away from her neck followed by a cool, wet, sensation on the side of her skin. It wasn't unpleasant but it did feel a little odd, the nearest of the main arteries to her brain fluttering in psychosomatic response. The pain in her lungs eased almost immediately, but it took a few minutes for her itchy eyes and stuffed up nose to relax; although, those latter symptoms had been complicated by an emotional response as much as the chemical reaction.

Bones McCoy helped her to her feet, asking her to sit on the raised floor section while he ran a few more tests. Jaylah sat quietly, focusing on not getting into any more trouble. After a few minutes, First Contact Gramsci walked back in, leading a very sore looking Montgomery Scotty. His skin, normally a soft hectorite appeared stretched tight and deeply reddened. His hands appeared too big and he was eager to sit in one of the chairs in the hospital room.

"Montgomery Scotty!" She began, then faltered. What could she say? "I'm so sorry. You look like pain. I might have killed you." Her voice grew smaller and smaller as she went on.

"Aye. Well." He paused, clearly looking for something to say. "Bloody automated subroutines couldn't transport a gnat through a barn door. Any human transporter chief would have held us in the buffer until...issues were resolved. Rather than dropping us in an emergency response ward. How are you feeling, Lassie. I was mostly dematerialized, but you..."

He broke off, giving Bones McCoy a serious look. "It was touch and go for a while there" the human doctor said softly, laying his hand on Jaylah's shoulder. "You went code white on us, twice. I don't know if it would have gone as well if you had a centralized cardiovascular system."

"I don't understand." Jaylah said a little listlessly. She was tired of not understanding what Bones McCoy was saying, but she lacked the energy to muster up any real indignation.

The doctor brought over one of his hand held electronics and placed it on her thigh. He flipped through a couple of screens before bringing up an image of one of her aortic vessels. It seemed to be a live image, the valves of her ostia working, drawing blood into the five successive chambers: pressurizing it and propelling it out into the artery. "You know how your blood is pumped throughout your body from many places?"

Jaylah nodded a little dubiously. She knew as much as was taught to any young child. That there were places in her body, inside her: neck, arms, legs, and the bottom of her back that made her blood work and that if she got cut there she must go get help quickly.

"Well, humans only really have one place that pumps our blood, in our chest." He flipped the PADD over, placing it over his chest. Jaylah could see a complicated tangle of veins all surrounding a large lumpy pulsing organ. It was...really kind of creepy. That was inside of him? Jaylah reached out slowly, tentatively placing her hands on Bones McCoy's chest, feeling the deep heavy thud of the pulse shown on the screen. It was nothing like the light thrum that you could feel if you pressed on someone's neck or arm or something.

"In the transporter...accident" Bones McCoy went on, "You were partially pattern degraded... bits of you were lost and we had to regrow them. There was a lot of internal bleeding. If you had just had one heart," he tapped on the display in clarification, "we would have had a lot of trouble keeping your blood circulating, but the distributed system meant that the load on any one point was reduced. It helped, a lot."

Jaylah nodded slowly, although her khutut dimmed to a confused double flicker. "What is code white?"

Bones McCoy and James T looked at each other, each appearing vaguely unwell. "It's when we cannot detect any organized neural activity. It's how we define the line between life and death."

"I died?" She yelped, her voice shooting up through an octave. "Twice?"

"Technically." He said softly, watching her eyes, "but only one, the first time, was really serious and both times we were able to revive you without major com- any big problems." He stopped, waiting to see how she would absorb this.

Jaylah turned to study the expanded Montgomery Scotty. "I killed you too?" she breathed.

"Nae. Like I said I was most of the way through. You're the one that caught it bad. Nothing a bit of time under a tissue regenerator couldn't fix. I've got a bit of reassembly swelling" he tried to flex his obviously painfully enlarged fingers, "but it'll go down soon enough." He stood up slowly, moving his way over to the white haired alien and, sitting gingerly on the raised floor with her, wrapped an arm around both of her shoulders. He smiled softly, "although, if you don't want to go out with me again, there are easier ways of letting a loon down easy."

"Why would you be staying inside?" The humans all chuckled, confusing her farther but at least Montgomery Scotty seemed to be working to suppress his anger with her. "I promise," she said softly, unable to meet anybody's eye, khutut almost entirely extinguished, "I promise, not to think I am knowing what is happening again."

"Good," was all James T had to respond with. His body language, even without any bioluminescent cues, was straight and intense but not overtly aggressive. He nodded his head at her to acknowledge her commitment.

First Contact Gramsci, who had been hovering in one of the corners, manipulating his multiple hand held electronics, cleared his throat. "I have been in contact with commodore Paris and commander Sunak. Since lieutenant commander Scott has agreed not to file assault charges and since Sunak is willing to entertain," he swung his first two fingers on each hand through the air as he said this, "issuing an excessive force complaint, commodore Paris has agreed to a private interview as opposed to a public hearing. Uh. How long until you can release her Doctor McCoy?"

"Well, I was able to get the rest of her blood work panels run but I still need to run a strength and reaction time panel and an inoculation suite... but I guess good practice needs to bow to bureaucratic needs?"

"It would be, um, helpful, if you could temporarily postpone those procedures, yes. Having the meeting at say fifteen hundred hours, thus ending before the first sitting of dinner, should help improve the commodore's mood." First Contact Gramsci said with a very small smile.

Bones McCoy just blew air out through his nose, and, picking up his wheetlebeeping probe, he passed it slowly over her body. Jaylah watched the two of them, head turning to each as they spoke having no idea what was going on but not liking the sound of any of it. When he was done waving his probe at her, Bones McCoy sighed. "Fine. As of 13.3094 Jaylah of um"

"Bariq" First Contact Gramsci supplied and then chuckled when Jaylah's head whipped toward him fast enough to fan out her hair, "you said you had been on Altamid so long you had forgotten how long the days on Bariq were. I, uh, am sorry. I dug through every database I could find but I couldn't locate any mentions of a planet or a moon called Bariq."

Jaylah sighed khutut slowly cooling from the hot glow of panic. She had been certain, at first, that mentioning her home had been a subtle threat but maybe that was more Altamidian thinking. If someone had come across her home, then maybe they would know how to get back to it. She sighed, slowly nodding. "Planet," she added as a peace offering. "My home."

"You want to go back." Montgomery Scotty said it like it was a statement, not a question, but she nodded anyway khutut aljism glittering in fond longing.

"I cannot promise we will find it," First Contact Gramsci added, "we have only mapped a tiny portion of the beta and alpha quadrants but if you tell me something about the system we may be able to narrow it down a little."

Before she could decide whether or not to elaborate, however, James T broke in, "What can you tell me about this meeting, Gramsci?"

First Contact Gramsci sighed, turning to Jaylah. "The commodore's job is to make sure that everyone on this station is safe. Now, please trust me, no one is going to hurt you. The commodore cannot order anyone to hurt to you, ever, and, because this is an informal meeting, the worst that can happen, if she is convinced that you are an immediate danger to the people of Yorktown, is that she can restrict you to your room." His words sped up at Jaylah's gasped breath and tensing muscles. "But you aren't a threat, and she doesn't really think you are. We just have to show her that you are willing to follow the rules and she will come up with a way to help you do that. And," he flicked his eyes toward James T, "this meeting, provided nobody tries anything, will be off the record." He emphasized the word anything, holding James T's eyes until the captain nodded.

James T breathed heavily, but he held out his hand to help her off the raised floor. As soon as she was upright, Montgomery Scotty flopped down, saying something about feeling like he had fallen asleep on a beach in the Sirius system. First Contact Gramsci and James T stepped out of the room and Jaylah, after making sure her engineer was really okay, followed them.

As they turned, heading down the long narrow room Jaylah was quickly coming to associate with federation spaces, First Contact Gramsci sighed. "I am sorry. I should have been there to meet you at the hospital entrance, or maybe your room. A good part of my job, besides teaching you about life in the Federation and learning about life on Bariq, is to prevent misunderstandings like this." He paused and bowed, "I am deeply relieved that you, and lieutenant commander Scott, of course, are unharmed. You have every right to request a new first contact representative... and maybe you should. This is my first time doing this, but there are many more experienced ambassadors on hand."

Jaylah looked down at the floor, khutut alwajh double flickering a soft denial. "I was the puller of the trigger."

"Perhaps. But I should have been there to let you know there was no danger. I just... didn't think. Transporters are so common I just... overlooked them."

James T turned around, pressing his finger into the hollow under First Contact Gramsci's clavicle. "So, what? You fucked up and now you are going to dump her off on someone else? You started developing this relationship and now you are going to see it through. You know you messed up, bad? Good. Now you can do something about it. Better still, everyone is still alive for you to actually do anything about." He stared into the federation liaison officer's eyes until First Contact Gramsci looked at the floor. James T turned his eyes on Jaylah and she swore that she could feel actual heat from his gaze. "I know that you have been fighting long enough to know the consequences of violence. You are skilled, obviously, but that is worthless if you don't think before you act. You both messed up but all this moping isn't helping anyone. Learn from this. Be better from this."

He snorted and went stomping off down the hallway. "I assume we are going to the universal translator suite," he called over his shoulder.

Gramsci and Jaylah exchanged a long look before following after the angry captain. "Er, yes." the younger human confirmed. Jaylah felt strange. She was bristling after her dressing down, but she was having a hard time directing her ire at James T. It was just that... it had been so long since anybody had expected anything from her. She wanted to show him that she could be better. It was one thing to live reacting only for herself. But to be there for other people? That was going to take something new. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted the responsibility.

James T lead them through a more distant smaller narrow room into a very small circular room that vaguely resembled the lifting room in the sleeping building. "Universal Translator Suite" James T said to the air. Immediately the room began to lower, like the lifting room had, but then it swung around to the side. There were no windows but Jaylah's inner ear said that they were accelerating and changing directions rapidly, like they were flying through the hospital. In spite of herself she couldn't keep the excited glow from creeping into her khutut aljism as her body moved with the shifting room.

They stepped out into a large space with many computer panels. There were even stacks of humming electronics that vaguely resembled the hidden computer core on her house. Better still, there were stands lined with lights that shown in a true white, not the cool blue federation mix. "What is this place?" She wanted to know.

"This is primary universal translator room three. It's a computer system designed to rapidly learn any language and translate between any series of languages. This is the state of the art model," he said with obvious pride, "it is how we all speak with each other when we aren't speaking Federation standard." He paused, keying in a few commands while turning to look at her, "not that we aren't all impressed with how well you can speak Common. It took me forever to pick up the helpful Vulcan additions to the grammar after growing up speaking Terran and Italian. But when we meet with the Commodore, well, it'll be best to avoid any miscommunications."

"If you can be doing this, why aren't you always?"

"There are limitations," James T said, his lips turning down slightly, "and not everyone likes the system. Its easy to assume that the computer is right all of the time, mostly because it almost always is, but those exceptions can cause real problems. And well, it can be distracting to listen to."

When Jaylah looked even more confused First Contact Gramsci stepped up onto the panel. Immediately, lights surrounded him. Jaylah smiled, khutut flickering in excitement. An actual hologram. It was really primitive but it was still the first three dimensional image she had seen Federation technology produce. First Contact Gramsci opened his mouth and Jaylah heard, "Do what you love and you do not work a day in your life"... only she hadn't really. She wasn't too good at reading the lips of Federation speakers but she was sure the sound had continued to play after the human had stopped speaking, and, moreover, the sound was overlayed on another sound "Fai quello che ami e non lavorerai un giorno della tua vita".

"Amazing," Jaylah breathed, khutut flickering hot in embarrassment over the gross understatement. "That was your Italian. The fai knuelloing? This machine can be learning Alkitan Prerisë?"

"Yes. To a certain extent. There are limitations. The more different the two languages are, the more artificial sounding the system becomes, and the more the sound delays add up. Also, idioms, expressions, um things that don't mean exactly what they say but require understanding the culture to understand?"

Jaylah nodded, understanding what First Contact Gramsci was getting at.

"Right, the computer has a hard time making those sound natural. The machine does scan your brainwaves for 'universal iconographs, whatever those are, which is supposed to fill in some of the holes, but I don't think it will ever replace a good linguist. Still, it is quick and efficient and should make our meeting with commodore Paris go more smoothly."

Jaylah nodded, khutut aljism cooling in mild apprehension. She stepped onto the platform and was surrounded by the primitive hologram. Her hair roots itched. Not that anything hurt, at all really, but the idea of a machine reaching into her brain made her nerves crawl.

James T leaned against one of the walls, arms crossed, watching while First Contact Gramsci manipulated some last minute screens, before looking up at her, "are you ready?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Say something in um Alkitten Prayer Se?"

Jaylah laughed softly. "Alkitan Prerisë" she corrected, emphasizing the stressed syllables and then paused, watching the lights fly across across the dozens of computer control panels lining the room.

"Good. But the sample needs to be much larger. Just keep talking. Do you know any stories or songs?"

Jaylah nodded slowly. Her education had been rather dramatically cut short but there had been a few artifacts saved on her baei alththulai besides the combat holograms she had been using them for. "Is it needing to be spoken by me. Can it be a record speaking?"

"Do you know what all the words mean?" Gramsci asked.

"Yes," Jaylah said very softly. She fished the small spherical holographic emitters from her belt pouch, running her thumb over the displays until she found the right one. She placed it on the ground and reduced the image amplification by a factor of ten in order to avoid any misunderstandings. A moment later a projection of a small 48 month old Jaylah strode out onto a wooden stage. Her khutut alwajh were flaring wildly with stage fright but her khutut aljism, under a startlingly feminine winged insect lace overlay dress, were bright with childhood poise. Her black hair was cropped very short in the academy style, there was a deep brown bark stain, complete with the inevitable ultraviolet sheen of chlorine scalding, on her cheek, evidence that she had been out roughhousing with the boys again. The tiny Jaylah squeaked out the ode to the yanbue alqaryat në Brys. The tone of the lyrics were off but she timed the rhythmic dance of her lights with the down beat of the drums driving home the meaning and the magnitude of the gratitude the people of alqaryat në Brys had for the life giving fountain, a massive artesian well that supplied pure water to their village in the foothills. Archaeological digs had found evidence of Babëreshë inhabiting the region for over a millennium.

"Was that little redheaded girl you?" James T asked with a soft smile while First Contact Gramsci bent down to examine the details of the repeating hologram more closely.

"Which me? The me in the picture? I wasn't having. I was having black hair at that then."

"Oh." He looked a little confused. "So who is the girl in the hologram?"

"Me" Jaylah repeated herself equally confused.

"But her hair is red."

Red, Jaylah thought. Right. One of the Federation words for infrared frequencies. "Oh. No. My hair is not giving off much heat. It is not much alive."

"You...color correct to bring in infrared light?" James T guessed.

"No... I am being recorded in true light."

"But I can see that your hair is red."

"You can see red?" Jaylah said drawing the words out. James T and Montgomery Scotty had been saying it but it had just clicked. "You can be seeing infrared! How useful would that be! Are you seeing where I was being?" She waved her hands back and forth slowly wondering if she was giving off streamers of light as she heated the air around her palm.

"I, um, no? I can only see the normal 7 colors."

"None of what you can see is normal." She teased. "Montgomery Scotty said you aren't seeing any of the warm colors. Half of them you are not seeing."

"You can see into the ultraviolet" First Contact Gramsci asked calmly as if he was just looking for confirmation.

"Yes." Her khutut flickered in agreement "or at least, a good bit of it. Some of the light that is being really warm goes to black, but light that warm shines badly in air."

"Interesting. That would explain the excimer carrying proteins you have in the cells that line your markings. You can see the light released when they are depolarized?"

"Of course" Jaylah responded. Explaining what she and Montgomery Scotty had already worked out about Federation visual deficits.

"Very good. I will talk with him and grab those findings of his PADD thank you. Well. In that case, I guess you might say that we see a very little bit of the infrared spectrum. From your perspective at least. An object has to be very hot indeed to glow at a frequency we can see, far hotter than it would take to injure us by touching, so we generally do not consider these wavelengths as infrared. But you can make an argument for expanding the frequencies to the edge of what ever the local visible colors are... er never mind, sorry. You can take the academic out of academia but... So. You can't see red...that might be useful. You couldn't have seen the red warning text. Can we go through a series of colors that most member species can see?"

Jaylah blinked at him trying to work through the torrent of words that the excitable human was want to give off occasionally. Ultimately, she decided that "Yes" was a sufficient catch all response. First Contact Gramsci showed her a blank hand held electronic, which was, well, a little baffling, but after a couple of very awkward minutes the screen began to warm to a very dark cold green. "I am seeing the screen a little. It is hard to be seeing still" Jaylah told him.

"Hmm. 580 nanometers. Got it. I'll make sure to put a note in your file to blue shift all colors above that threshold whenever you are logged into a panel."

After that they went back to working with the universal translator system. Jaylah had played most of her recordings and babbled a little bit in awkward rusty alkhitab prerisë before the computer overroad her words with a very crude approximation of what she had just said. After that it was "just a matter of working out the details" as First Contact Gramsci said. Those details, however, took three hours to work out and after Jaylah had run through all the exceptions she could remember about her language, nouns used as verbs under certain circumstances non standard loan words from different alkwitab from different countries and bizare tenses she couldn't imagine coming up in a real life conversation that small electronics filled room had grown close indeed and Jaylah was litterally vibrating with nerves.

The end result was not all that Jaylah had hoped for. It was common for alkhitab prerisë to drop and combine assumable syllables meaning that she often would finish speaking a second or two before the superimposed voice completed its translation, and if she jumped into the next sentence too quickly the system would become confused and double layer the translations resulting in a hopeless mess. However, her language used a smaller number of base nouns, instead reliying on serialized adjectives to provide context. Consequently, whenever she was trying to explain something in technical detail or to give specific instructions the translating voice would frequently finish before she was done speaking resulting in choppy distorted sentences. And, of course, the problems were inverted when translating from Federation Standard to Alkhitab prerisë.

Further problems arose when it became apparent that Jaylah's vocabulary was fairly limited in her native tongue. She had been a very young child still when she undertook her flight on the doomed Përpjekje, worse, her fluency had only degraded durring her long exile on Altamid. The recordings on Jaylah's bawei alththulai, particularly the captured messages her father had left her, helped flesh out some of the vocabulary, but the system, because it was based on interpreting universal brainwaves, could only translate with as much fidelity as Jaylah's memory provided. The computer tried valiently, breaking down words in the standard federation into longer phrases of simpler al'Bariqat words. With enough patience that was reasonablly effective, but patience was required when a couple of sentences were converted into a minute long diatribe.

Still, Jaylah reflected, it was mostly better than nothing. She rubbed at the spot on her ear where the subdermal speaker had been implanted. She had also been issued with her own commbadge which had the alkhitab prerisë – standard translation matrix preinstalled. She could turn the translation feature on or off by stroking the side of badge. Beyond that, she couldn't help playing with the small pin, tapping it with her fingers to make it chirp back at her. She had contacted Montgomery Scotty with it and had been relieved to hear that her was feeling better and that Bones McCoy had releasaed him from the medical room.

"Okay," First Contact Gramsci decided eventually. "That's about as good as it is going to get. Let's grab a sandwhich real fast before we catch our flight to command for our...interview."


End file.
